In this issue: Why flat-rate AI pricing was always too good to last. Danish School of Media and Journalism’s Peder Hammerskov on value, trust, and what AI should never replace. Plus: Six ways to shrink your token bill before someone does it for you.
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.
Was the monthly AI subscription a scam, designed to hide what these services actually cost? GitHub Copilot switched to token-based billing, and OpenAI needs to 10x its revenue by 2030 to keep Oracle from collapsing. Long, angry, and very footnoted. (Ed Zitron)
AI that only knows things from before the Great Depression: Introducing talkie, a 13B language model trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text.
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
What if your AI agent doesn’t actually work for you? A field report from a Harvard summit on the agentic future of news: when personal AI agents become the primary gatekeepers, whoever shapes the agent’s “model of your intentions” becomes the most powerful editorial force in history. It’s scarier than the attention economy. (Lars Adrian Giske)
Ethics don’t scale. Paul Ford traces how AI labs started as altruistic crusades to save humanity from killer robots and ended up lobbying for bills that limit their liability in mass deaths. (New York Times)
Is raw reporting material, all those notes, photos and audio that never made it into the CMS, the actual product? Journalists verify and judge, AI handles the packaging. Burt Herman of Hacks/Hackers shows a proof-of-concept with NYC mayoral communications.
Brainrot
Internet slang for mindless digital consumption. In late 2024 and early 2025, “Italian brainrot” became a TikTok and Instagram meme—AI-generated videos featuring characters like Chimpanzini Bananini speaking in fake Italian gibberish. It’s not slop, it’s… art? Gen Z only
Corporate earnings calls and press releases show the most obvious AI writing tic of 2025 – that “not just X, it’s Y” construction. It went from ~50 mentions in 2023 to over 200 in 2025. Microsoft, Cisco, McKinsey, Accenture: all guilty. (Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch)
How to reduce your token footprint
Newer, more capable models use more tokens. And users put whole books, code bases, videos into chats. We all knew where this was going to go: Monthly AI subscriptions are subsidized and don’t cover the cost of compute. A token is a unit of meaning, like a word or part of a word. AI companies...
The website is no longer the default destination for news: “Chatbots are now rendering components, not just text. Interactive tables. Charts that respond to the conversation. Comparison layouts. Forms that collect structured input.” (Florent Daudens, AI in the News)
For 20 years, Google blocked other sites from embedding Google.com. Today it announced it will embed every publisher’s site into its own AI pages, ignoring the exact browser protections it helped build. (Thomas Baekdal, LinkedIn)
A breakdown of the scraper economy: bulk harvesters, answer engines, search hybrids, and the infrastructure layer. The market hit $1 billion in 2025. Not one dollar flows back to publishers. (Matthew Scott Goldstein, LinkedIn)
Journalism under siege, but Perugia delivered anyway: the Reuters Institute rounds up the International Journalism Festival, from AI editorial responsibility to a Romanian poverty podcast, a WhatsApp newsroom serving 100,000 people across the US-Mexico border, and whether news creators and traditional journalists can stop being weird about each other.
The AI disruption in media is about demand: Machine audiences are becoming the primary consumers, and whoever owns the interface captures the value. The demand signal, not clicks or time spent, is the defining asset. Also read her take on liquid content economics. (Shuwei Fang, The Economist)
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:
