In the beginning was the chatbot, and the chatbot was with AI, and the chatbot was AI. Next was moving from prompts to systems. Plugging emails, data, other software into these systems became easier, organizing context, the scaffolding. All the while models got "thinking" abilities and worked longer on tasks, correcting and steering themselves along...
Hi, I'm Ole Reissmann, a journalist who builds things. I'm the first Director of AI at SPIEGEL. Before that: podcasts, news product development, platform strategy. I write about AI and journalism and send a newsletter you might enjoy.
Eli “Filter Bubble” Pariser is back with a 70-slide deck calling AI agents the new feed algorithm, and sees a trust economy emerging: small, high-reputation communities beat mass reach, and whoever figures out the rules for the human-agent public square first wins.
Three Questions with Alba Mora Roca, AJ+
Three Questions with Rignam Wangkhang, CBC
Three Questions with Shuwei Fang, Harvard-Fellow
Three Questions with Cecilia Rikap, University College London
Three Questions with Kemal Görgülü, Arte
Three Questions with Nikita Roy, Newsroom Robots
Four Question with Jaemark Tordecilla, Journalist and Advisor
Three Questions with Tess Jeffers, Wall Street Journal
Three Questions with Rubina Fillion, New York Times
Paul Ford can explain coding and vibecoding, and in this podcast episode, he does both, with a healthy dose of “Man, nobody knows.” (Channels, Peter Kafka)
I’ve linked to him before, and this is a level-headed reality check: “Zitron’s skepticism would be more useful if he accepted the fact that people are widely using AI agents for coding and paying money for this out of rational economic self-interest” (Kelsey Piper, The Argument)
Toothcomb is a free, open-source tool for fact-checks in real time, straight in your browser, transcription build in, bring your own Claude API keys. Upload an MP3, go live with a mic, or paste text. (Rob Dawson)
Grounding
LLMs generate text by predicting word patterns, but they don’t know what words actually mean to humans. That’s why they sometimes hallucinate. But when you provide outside information—like documents or websites—their answers can be anchored to real, meaningful data. That’s grounding. Harnad, Stevan (1990): The symbol grounding problem
A brief look at how German news agency dpa is building a “trusted information layer” designed to plug its verified news, data, and partner sources directly into the AI workflows of its clients. (Teemu Henriksson, WAN-IFRA)
Do legacy reach-publishers have a future? People Inc’s 40 media brands are losing search traffic, but the company says 41% of digital revenue no longer depends on website visits. It’s social video, AI licensing deals, a recipe platform, and an app where people stick around. (Charlotte Tobitt, Press Gazette)
What happens when you give an AI agent a credit card and two weeks alone? Hannah Fry built an agent with OpenClaw, handed it $100, and filmed the results. (YouTube)
Vibecoding puts health records and customer data out in the open: A security researcher found hundreds of websites were leaking data through a commonly used service called Supabase (which blamed its new type of user.) (Eva Wolfangel, Die Zeit)
Vibecoding a data visualization dashboard for a Philippine health survey turned out to be “AI does the boring parts while you have to make a lot of editorial calls.” Jaemark Tordecilla covers the wins (data cleaning, pivoting fast, chart generation) and the walls he hit. (Generative AI in the Newsroom)
When you use AI to edit your writing, readers think you’re smarter, richer, whiter, and more politically extreme. AI writing assistance systematically distorts how others perceive you, a study shows. Writers still prefer the AI version. (Paul Röttger, LinkedIn)
Casey Newton is rebuilding his newsletter around scoops and original reporting, cutting the link roundups and even analysis. The bigger question: What kinds of editorial businesses cannot be replaced by AI? (Laura Hazard Owen, Nieman Lab)
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:
