AI Mode has over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S. and India, says Google. (Abner Li, 9to5Google)
/ AI & Journalism
Scoops by passionate people you trust: Axios CEO Jim VandeHei sees no future for “average” journalists who chronicle events and declares the era of “Super Journalists.” He might be right and tone-deaf.
Make prompt engineering great again: A growing list of tools may help you improve your generative AI prompts, but sometimes all you need is a spreadsheet. (Clare Spencer, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
Substack surveyed 2,000 of its publishers: Male writers embrace AI (55%), women less enthralled (38%) by the so-called productivity boost.
Generative AI models love to cite Reuters and Axios, Muck Rack study finds. Major models cite journalism in nearly half of responses that require recency. (Andrew Deck, NiemanLab)
Surprising no one, new report from The Pew Research Center says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks. (Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica)
AI-generated band “The Velvet Sundown” garners 1M+ Spotify streams, sparking debates over platform transparency and artist compensation. (Lanre Bakare, The Guardian)
AI etiquette: “Whoa, let me stop you right here buddy, what you’re doing here is extremely, horribly rude.” (Alex Martsinovich)
The Directory of Liquid Content: Sannuta Raghu made a framework to make it easier to assemble, adapt, or repurpose news stories across contexts, users, or platforms.
AI is killing the web. Can anything save it? asks The Economist, referring to business models that rely on traffic and advertising. Tollbit, a paywall for bots, reports its highest per-crawl rates at a local newspaper. Unique content appears to be part of the solution.
Rise of the Fakecast: The Uncanny Valley of AI-Generated Podcasts
Research question: Given a newsletter and three articles mentioned therein, can AI make a passable podcast fakecast? Time constraint: 60 minutes Setup: Claude 4 Opus, Gemini 2.5 Text-to-Speech Result: 14-minute podcast Is it any good? At first, it seems impressive. I like how the different sources get incorporated, with the speakers looping back to arguments...
How the Associated Press Built its AI Strategy Without Breaking Trust (Ulrike Langer, News Machines)
Rename screenshots with a description automatically with Gemini–for free
Screenshots. I take lots of them. I need something I see in my browser for a presentation. I want to remember something I see on social media on my phone. So. Many. Screenshots. And then what? Google has launched a tool to access Gemini 2.5 Pro from the command line. It’s called Gemini-CLI, and it...
Consent Manufacturing
That pop-up where your favorite social media platform announces some changes to their terms and conditions? No biggie, your personal data just became training data for AI. Opt-out becomes the default, turning resistance into exhaustion and compliance into surrender. Lippmann, Walter (1922): Manufacture of Consent