While you type, the computer guesses your next word. Press tab to accept it. The more you use it, the better it gets. By computer, I mean a small AI model running entirely on your machine. Private, fast, and free of API costs. This can feel like actual magic. I've been chasing something like this...
/ AI & Journalism / Blog Entries
No Big Deal, Just the Most Important AI Media Conference
Three days in Copenhagen and the lingering thought: news may not be the asset we think it is. Shuwei Fang’s and David Caswell’s Signals at Scale brought together news, civil society, and academia to think from the ground up what an AI mediated news ecosystem can and should look like. “Be suspicious of solutions that...
9 Real AI Use Cases from the Hacks/Hackers Journalism Summit 2026
300 journalists, developers, and media folks gathered for two days at The Real News Network offices in Baltimore for workshops, vibecoding sessions, talks, and eventually karaoke. Rubina Fillion (New York Times), Ryan Struyk (CNN), and I kicked off the conference with a panel, exquisitely moderated by Heather Ciras (Boston Globe). Two days of building tools,...
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...
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...
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...
Instant voice cloning, on a MacBook Air, for free, no Elevenlabs
Chinese e‑commerce giant Alibaba has released new Qwen models for generating and cloning voices earlier this year. Which means: With only a couple of seconds of recorded material, we can generate a cloned voice recording. On a four year old MacBook Air. Instantly. At no cost. This used to be the domain of Elevenlabs. The...
Contrastive negation used to be a rhetorical device, now it screams “I used ChatGPT”
This is the future, not a newsletter. When you define something by saying what it's not, it's called "contrastive negation." Nowadays, it's a telltale of AI writing. You can see it all over Threads and LinkedIn. At the same time, the bros are feeding chatbots the Wikipedia definition of "AI writing" and telling them to...
You can just build things
My website was put together with a text editor and a "better done than perfect" attitude. I added new things here and there. Fiddled around. Over time, it got messy. And I never built a dark mode, because I feared the time it would take to rebuild everything. But you're looking at a much improved...
Is the image even real? Can we verify the facts?
Those questions framed the conversation at last Thursday's AI for Media Network gathering in Hamburg. 120+ representatives from media organizations and academia met to discuss AI in verification and research. It was the first time the event was hosted at SPIEGEL-Gruppe's Hamburg offices. Gerret von Nordheim, deputy head of SPIEGEL's fact-checking department, presented our in-house...
Links to a talk on trust and AI
Taken out of context without the talk at AI for Media somewhat incomprehensible. Google DeepMind: SynthID olereissmann.com: Hands on with SynthID Guardian: AI images of Maduro capture reap millions of views on social media Guardian: White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest MDR: Sächsische Polizeigewerkschaft verteidigt KI-Bild Samira El Ouassil:...
Bring AI into your CMS with a Chrome plugin
This gets a little technical, but with AI's help it's straightforward. Here's how it works: a Chrome plugin grabs content from the CMS text fields, sends it to ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude with various preset prompts, and displays the response right in the browser. For example: checking against your house style. A plausibility check. Suggestions...
Model of the moment
If you aren’t using Qwen3-Max-Thinking already, you’re … just like me. As much as I try to stay current, I also have to get real work done. So for me it’s the latest Claude Opus and the latest Gemini, for both writing and coding. I bounce between the two: most days I start with Opus,...
26 AI and Journalism Links for 2026
Look, I get it. Your inbox is drowning in trend reports. Another one just dropped. And another. Plus seventeen meta-analyses of the meta-analyses, and at this point everyone's just rage-feeding the whole mess into NotebookLM like it's some kind of AI garbage disposal. It's exhausting. Truly. I've done the scrolling. Consider this your cheat code....
“I Don’t Trust AI an Inch When It Comes to Facts”: Matthias Fiedler asked me 22 questions for his newsletter StoryCodes
Matthias Fiedler is a colleague of mine at SPIEGEL – he covers sports from Munich. In his newsletter StoryCodes, he gives journalists tips on AI, and occasionally he interviews a guest. And this time I got to be the one! Since his newsletter is published in German, here's my English translation: GPT-5. When the mechanics...
