Objection has overruled itself. This spring, Peter Thiel’s high-profile new startup had sought to disrupt journalism by establishing a tribunal in which reporters would be dragooned into AI-powered arbitrations paid for by the unhappy subjects of their articles. Now, the company has been renamed The Primary, pivoting to a system in which journalists are ranked on a digital scoreboard by the expertise of a large language model.
Objection’s CEO is Aron D’Souza, the entrepreneur-provocateur behind Enhanced Games, known as the “steroid Olympics,” who first gained fame as the legal mastermind behind Thiel’s bid to secretly finance Hulk Hogan’s successful invasion of privacy suit against the media outlet Gawker, which the right-wing tech billionaire despised.
Objection’s first tribunal, in April, targeted The Hollywood Reporter for its 2021 coverage about an heir to the Sackler family, whose Purdue Pharma fortune was built off OxyContin. In an interview, D’Souza told THR that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”
D’Souza and Objection’s CTO Kyle Grant-Talbot — who met at Oxford, where they first founded a laundry service in 2018 — acknowledged they’d found it difficult to build proprietary software that wouldn’t be accused of outputting slop justice. “The AI-based reasoning models are easy in comparison to adjudication,” D’Souza said. (Objection pivoted before issuing a verdict in THR‘s tribunal.)
