Case Study: How the Financial Times Approaches Transparency about AI Use in News (Liz Lohn, Felix M. Simon)

12 lessons from news outlets on the cutting edge of AI (Jacob Granger, Journalism UK)

With the new ChatGPT 5.1, you can give the chatbot one of several preset personalities – from cynical, friendly to nerdy. This is supposed to make it nicer, warmer, more entertaining again, like the 4o variants. Otherwise, there’s still general confusion about whether the model is actually new. Ethan Mollick has examples on LinkedIn.

“Shell Game” is back: Evan Ratliff’s podcast returns. The first new episode comes alongside a major Wired feature: “Sam Altman says the one-person billion-dollar company is coming. Maybe I could be that person—if only I could get my colleagues to shut up and stop lying.” (Podcast, Article)

Swiss Tagesanzeiger reports on the business of junk content and automated pseudo-news. Fakes were spread about one of the article’s authors. The journalists spoke with a junk site operator who comes from the SEO world (of course) and thinks it’s all wonderful.

While everyone is talking about Liquid Content, Time Magazine is launching its AI Agent, a kind of Deep Research based on its own archive.

This is not one of those “superintelligence is just around the corner” pieces, but rather asks if maybe we’re already learning too much about our own brains, demystifying thinking and its implications. You can’t know too much, can you? (James Somers, The New Yorker)

Make this your weekend read: Designer Frank Chimero talks about AI and specifically vibe coding. “Time saved is not strength gained,” he says, and gets into how Brian Eno works with machines for his music. And then there is a nice riff on the Ghibli movie “Spirited Away”. Recommended!

The BBC wants to make its AI use transparent to users – and is coming up with a new icon: Sparkles out, nondescript, boring, unobtrusive hexagon in.

How is the agentic web going? Amazon filed a lawsuit demanding Perplexity stop allowing its AI browser Comet to make purchases for users. (Shirin Ghaffary and Matt Day, Bloomberg)

A visit to the nonprofit that powers most of today’s AI training: Common Crawl ingests the web, journalism and all, unapologetically. The article falls a bit short on fair use and other archives, but it’s a good read. (Alex Reisner, The Atlantic)

New paper: Which sources does ChatGPT provide in Germany when asked for the latest news? Main takeaway: Very different results depending on whether you use the customer chat interface or the API. Customers get more results from content partners, the API is more diverse or even fringe.

The Top Challenges of Using LLMs for Content Moderation: While it’s from a corporate blog of a vendor of AI-enabled moderation, I found it to be useful, particularly the common-pitfalls-section. (Alice Hunsberger, Musubi)

They speak our language, but it does not appear to constrain their thought: “AIs tend to express liberal, secular values even when asked in languages where the typical speaker does not share those values.” Fascinating research by Kelsey Piper.

Channel4 had a segment about AI-driven job loss presented by an AI host—and the Guardian published a hilarious (if not predictably) takedown. (Stuart Heritage, The Guardian)