Did you notice the Guardian gleefully chronicles the firing of senior journalists for making errors while using AI? Made-up quotes, plagiarized sentences, they should have known better, they knew better. Now they have to suffer. Full name and picture. Meanwhile, a broader audience comes to terms that books are sometimes written with the help of...
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.
Is it wrong to write a book with AI? Joshua Rothman compares AI-generated fiction to the Roland TR-808 drum machine: once despised, now everywhere. The analogy is fun, the question is real, and the “Shy Girl” scandal gives it actual stakes. (Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker)
Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg uses AI to write articles, got profiled by the WSJ, and the journalism internet lost its collective mind. Now the Reuters Institute interviews him. Working with AI has “pushed me into more original reporting, because all algorithms and all AI products are necessarily backward-looking.”
“AI responses may include mistakes,” Google says at the bottom of its AI Overviews. How many? According to a startup, 1 out of 10 summaries is problematic. That’s “millions of erroneous answers every hour.” (The New York Times)
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
Peter Stuart’s AI-powered Velora Cycling runs on a custom CMS that automates everything from news discovery to pre-publish fact-checking. But the real business turns out to be licensing the tool. (Kari McMahon, A Media Operator)
What’s it with the savior narrative? Sebastian Mallaby's biography of Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind) asks if one decent man can steer AI development. It’s good on the philosophy and the personalities, less good on the hard questions. At times the awestruck tone is difficult to swallow. (Gideon Lichfield, The Economist)
Rage Code
When someone builds a competing product out of spite, within hours, to prove a point. Used in March 2026 after developer Yash Bhardwaj threatened to open-source his app exactly one minute after an obnoxious dude announced he'd clone it for free using Claude Code. Vibecoding's angry cousin.
Ghost Pepper: Hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS. Local, powered by WhisperKit and local LLM cleanup.
apfel is the free AI already on your Mac. macOS Tahoe ships with a 3B parameter LLM (quick tasks yes, complex reasoning no).
There’s a rule: any headline phrased as a question can always be answered with no. So when The New Yorker asks whether you can trust OpenAI’s Sam Altman to make the right calls on how A.I. is used “in immigration enforcement, domestic surveillance, and autonomous weaponry in war zones” – what do you think the answer is? (Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz)
“The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.”
Heretic strips the refusal behavior from any transformer-based language model automatically, no ML expertise needed. Decensoring Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct takes about 45 minutes with a modern graphics card.
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:
