A popular way to run local AI models, Ollama, seems to be one of the shadiest (Zetaphor, Sleeping Robots). I’ve switched to LM Studio recently and use it with Gemma4, highly recommended.
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 the “stochastic parrot” framing both empirically wrong and harmful to AI ethics? (SE Gyges, Very Sane AI)
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
Use all the tools, but own the work
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...
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.”
Alignment
You could argue that chatbots shouldn’t give out detailed instructions on how to kill someone or call themselves MechaHitler. Most AI companies align their models this way, showing them during training what to generate and what not to generate. It’s a bit of an art, really, as we haven’t found a good way to calculate...
“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)
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)
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)
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:
