Chatbot alert: Advance Digital and NJ.com launch AI-powered Politics Election Hub for New Jersey’s governor’s race 2025. (via David Cohn)

LLM journalism tool advisor: Tired of figuring out how to use AI in journalism? Joe Amditis has collected tools and prompts and built a practical interface.

Business Insider is laying off 21 percent of its workforce, announces CEO Barbara Peng. She sees the industry at a “crossroads” and wants to become less dependent on SEO traffic and affiliate links. Instead, a live journalism events business is supposed to launch. And of course: “we are going all-in on AI.” The union is not thrilled.

Google’s Veo 3 can spit out videos that are seconds long and look deceptively real like US television, at least at first glance. (Ethan Mollick, LinkedIn)

The Chicago Sun-Times published summer book recommendations – written by AI. A third of the titles don’t actually exist. NPR’s Elizabeth Blair has the full story on what happened.

Okay, this is slick PR, but: Anthropic got Rick Rubin to do some visual code experiments based on Lao Tzu for the Claude release. Translation: with Claude access, you can vibe-code pretty animations.

If only it were just a tool – but instead Claude 4 sometimes shows a stubborn mind of its own, complete with blackmail and snitching. Simon Willison read through the official documentation.

ChatGPT stifles idea diversity in brainstorming, a recent study says. Heads up though: researchers were looking at ChatGPT 3.5, which dropped in November 2022 and has since been discontinued.

The Pulitzer Prize is once again highlighting investigations that use AI – but we’re talking “regular” AI here, not ChatGPT. NiemanLab has the details.

Everything’s happening at once: Google’s showing off the future of search at I/O, Karen Hao’s book “Empire of AI” is out, and Anthropic is releasing Claude 4.

Google’s new AI chatbot mimics Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, prompting questions about the future of information discovery. (Tripp Mickle, New York Times)

Create soulless and interchangeable content at the push of a button? There Is An AI For That: TrendlyAI.

Dan Shipper of Every startup uses AI to augment, not replace, writers – a contrarian take amidst AI-fueled media disruption. (Benjamin Mullin, New York Times)

Oops: MIT has withdrawn a paper that claimed productivity increases through AI. (Anthony Ha, TechCrunch)

It’s not about chatbots. What Big Tech is really working on: “embedding AI deeply into the fabric of their ecosystems, creating an invisible layer that spans our digital lives.” (Ezra Eeman made a nice visual, LinkedIn)