That's the narrative. It goes like this: There's a group of powerful people in Silicon Valley who believe in effective altruism, want to live forever, and might be susceptible to fascism. They're not only building AI but believe in a super-intelligence that will have no bias and all the answers. So why not get rid...
/ AI & Journalism
Reuters Institute’s highlights from the International Journalism Festival 2025 in Perugia.
Transformer Lab is an open-source platform for building, tuning, and running LLMs locally, sans coding.
Seamless MCP-powered integrations sound appealing, but raise performance and security concerns. (Shrivu’s Substack)
Deep-dive into RAG and evaluation: How Süddeutsche built their election chatbot. (Medium)
Asking the tough question: “Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?” (Radek Sienkiewicz, VelvetShark)
“Stories that just could not be told without the assistance of AI”: NYT’s Zach Seward leans on AI tools, yet remains skeptical of AI-generated content. (Depth Perception)
Cautiously Optimistic AI Reckoning: Come See Our Talk at re:publica 25
Clare Spencer and I are heading to Berlin to talk about – waves hands dramatically – all of this. Journalism, AI, and whatever else feels relevant in this moment. We named our session AI in Media: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? and pitched this to re:publica: "Two industry insiders take you behind the scenes to...
AI is disrupting business models, warns Joshua Rothman: “We could be left with A.I.-summarized wire reports, Substacks, and not much else.” At the same time, he finds working with AI search “efficient, fun, and intellectually stimulating.” (The New Yorker)
Judicial panel overrides author preferences, bundles diverse copyright claims against AI companies into single NY proceeding. (Ella Creamer, The Guardian)
Sessions on Journalism and AI at the International Journalism Festival 2025 in Perugia
The festival is just around the corner, and here’s my annotated list of sessions focusing on AI and journalism that I plan to attend – and where you’ll likely find me. The session on the ideology behind AI (Captured). Thursday, 11:30 - 12:20, Auditorium San Francesco al Prato. With Natalia Antelava, Coda Story, Isobel Cockerell,...
The doomsday fantasy of effective altruists: The “AI in 2027” report imagines wild scenarios. Kevin Roose is less impressed. (New York Times)
OpenAI’s latest Ghibli meme trend brazenly exploits Miyazaki’s longstanding criticism of AI. (Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine)
Vibecoding at Frankfurt AI Forum
With the help of Claude, I vibecoded an interactive summary function into existence. At Frankfurt AI Forum, the newest event of the WAN-IFRA, the World Association of News Publishers, Financial Times' Liz Lohn talked about their successful AI summaries and how they give users the impression of realtime generation. I jumped at the opportunity to...
Is this already ‘agentic’? Google’s NotebookLM now searches and incorporates relevant web content.
