Politico’s chatbot for pro users, the Policy Intelligence Assistant, is spitting out made-up stuff when asked, like about a non-existent “League of Left-Handed Plumbers,” according to Semafor.
/ AI & Journalism
Google Labs Portraits: Author Kim Scott is letting Google make a chatbot version of her to coach people.
Don’t over-control: A sci-fi author on worldbuilding and storytelling with LLMs. (Eliot Peper, Every)
“Googled ‘I am a pigeon what should I do next’ and the google ai made me an entire itinerary?? With survival tips??” (pipers.jpeg, Threads)
Claude is only allowed one short quote under 15 words from web sources, and may not quote song lyrics in ANY form. (Benj Edwards, Ars Technica)
SEO agency analyzes 75k AI Overviews, finds that one-fifth cited media as sources. 31 percent came from BBC, NYT, and CNN.
Takeaways and key points: The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Yahoo News on generating AI summaries for news. (Sarah Scire, NiemanLab)
Google Releases NotebookLM’s Text-to-Speech Tech to Everyone
Google has released new text-to-speech models. It's the same tech powering NotebookLM's conversational podcasts. The models are called Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview TTS and Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview TTS. You can try both in Google AI Studio. Or use the API. First, you choose between single-speaker and multi-speaker audio. Then, choose one or two of...
This research paper argues against “reasoning/thinking” hype: intermediate tokens often lack substance, despite appearances.
FLUX.1 Kontext: The Black Forest image machine has new features. Images can now serve as input and be manipulated.
Comparing Google Search with AI Mode
This is a snapshot of a beta feature. It's June 2025. To test Google's AI Mode, you currently have to beam yourself to the US and go to Search Labs. Or you do a Google search, get an AI Overview, and discover, top left, a new feature called "AI Mode". Asked about layoffs at Business...
After 6 years in hiding, Venture Capitalist Mary Meeker is back with one of her famous trend reports. This time on AI. 340 pages of statistics.
But AI isn’t creative, isn’t funny, isn’t surprising! Always just average, everything’s been done before. That’s kind of true – but here comes a paper saying: You can actually train LLMs to be creative too. It’s called Creative Preference Optimization.
The OpenAI-suing New York Times is entering into a multi-year partnership with Amazon, with content appearing on Alexa and going into AI training. (Jaspreet Singh, Reuters)
