In this issue: While humans disappear into AI search engines, bots offer micropayments. Cloudflare wants to be your middleman (for a cut). Newsroom Robots’ Nikita Roy on reclaiming audience relationships. Plus: I tested ChatGPT Agent and Perplexity Comet on real tasks—and learned something about AI bias.
/ AI & Journalism
I tried ChatGPT Agent and Perplexity Comet to actually get things done
I've been playing with ChatGPT Agent and Perplexity Comet—and I'm not sure if I'm witnessing the future of productivity or just an elaborate way to make simple tasks more complicated. The premise sounds great: tell an AI what you want, and it'll just… do it. Book your train tickets, find that obscure book, curate a...
“Transparency” and “disclosure” are buzzwords in the AI and journalism space – this report looks at the state of global research. (Center for News, Technology & Innovation)
What I Learned from Making a ‘Liquid Content’ Machine (Clare Spencer, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
From an overview how newsrooms tackle bias in large language models: Humans and AI bots have biases. But the machine won’t be offended when you call it out. (Ramaa Sharma, Reuters Institute)
$200+ monthly fees: Welcome to the two-tier AI landscape favoring the well-off. (Reece Rogers, Wired)
“Despite appearances, an LLM does not actually output text”: The Guardian’s Joseph Lochlann Smith with a myth-busting deep dive. (Medium)
Image generation, without the “AI look”: Flux.1 Krea is an open weights model with opinionated aesthetics.
“There’s no getting around the decline in traffic”: Another apocalyptic roundup on what’s happening with search. (Klaudia Jaźwińska, Columbia Journalism Review)
Vibecoding
Not coding, but telling a chatbot what an app should do. It throws an error? Ask AI to fix it. Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe code” in early February 2025: “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” By month’s end, the New York Times had covered it. Backlash followed: vibecoded apps exposed...
Super Journalist
A marketing term by Axios CEO Jim VandeHei. He sees no future for “average” journalists who chronicle events. Instead, “Super Journalists” with deep passion for a topic and deep sourcing, knowledge, and credibility establish an authentic human connection, based on trust built over years. If only we had a word for it. (It’s “journalist.” The word...
Slop
Used to describe low quality content made with the help of AI. As in: “I hate this AI-slop.” Was funny in 2023. Can carry classist undertones. Dangerzone Sarkar, Advait (2025): AI Could Have Written This: Birth of a Classist Slur in Knowledge Work
Stochastic Parrots
After an influential paper criticising AI hype and describing fallacies of generative AI. Perfect back in 2021. While the critique still stands, newer models and use cases make you seem stuck in the past when using the expression. Dangerzone Bender, Emily M.; Gebru, Timnit; McMillan-Major, Angelina; Mitchell, Margaret (2021): On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models...
Stateless Functions
Chatting with a bot won’t make it smarter for you or other users. Models have no memory of previous conversations. To mimic a chat, previous inputs and outputs must be sent to the model each time. Training happens once using massive datasets before deployment. (Your data might still be stored by the company for future...
