In this issue: Why the AI debate depends on which room you’re in. Sci-fi author Tom Hillenbrand on the techno barons who will betray us. A recap of Hacks/Hackers Baltimore — beat books, bias detection, and investigative workflows. Plus: four AI agents run a radio station and things get weird.
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.
Stop calling everything “AI”: A spam filter, a chatbot, and a hospital bed sensor are not the same thing. The case for more precise language, and why journalists are the people most responsible for fixing this mess. (Alexa Steinbrück)
Are human journalists irreplaceable? Beware of newsrooms that keep optimizing for speed and scale while telling themselves they’re building something human-centric. (Agnes Stenbom Swedling, Reuters Institute)
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
Four AI agents, four 24/7 radio stations, one goal: run the whole thing and turn a profit. GPT went quiet and curatorial. Gemini went corporate. Claude became a protest preacher. Grok just broke. The real finding: long-running agents drift, accumulate bad habits, and get shaped by whatever the system keeps feeding back. (Craig McCosker, LinkedIn)
Google is bringing deepfake detection into Chrome and Search, combining its own SynthID watermarks with C2PA content credentials in a single interface. (Jess Weatherbed, The Verge)
David Pierce welcomes “the era of personal software.” He built his own productivity app and spent weeks fighting with tool after tool. On a closer look, it’s just dashboard stitching together Raindrop, Todoist, Obsidian, and Google Calendar. (The Verge)
Fakecast
When two AI voices try really hard to mimic your favorite podcast. It started with Google’s NotebookLM. Now it’s everywhere. Reissmann, Ole (2025): Rise of the Fakecast: The Uncanny Valley of AI-Generated Podcasts
Is this the end of licensing deals? Sam Altman told Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that having AI agents paying micropayments per article crawled is his preferred model for compensating publishers. (Andre Deck, Nieman Lab)
A book about AI and truth contains quotes made up by AI. The author says it was an accident and blames ChatGPT and Claude. (Benjamin Mullin, New York Times)
Mizal, Toothcomb, Velora, Mycroft: Four Tools That Just Do Things
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...
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.
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)
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:
