Preparing a feast only to have it eaten by ghosts who don’t leave a tip: Wikipedia plans to regulate bot access and wants new attribution guidelines for web, apps, voice assistants, and LLMs. (Wikimedia)
/ AI & Journalism
We see clunky AI applications and resist the hype – this article makes the argument that we’re not caring enough about it. (Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker)
Dystopian vision or pragmatic future? Newsquest’s AI-powered content creators stir fears of eroded journalistic standards. (Bron Maher, Press Gazette)
SEO is shifting to crack AI search: focus on repetition and ‘answer-first’ structured content over rankings. (Threads)
AI & Journalism Podcasts That Don’t Suck (I Promise)
Here are my artificial intelligence and journalism podcast recommendations, based on actual listening. Explained: The conspiracy to make AI seem harder than it is! by Spotify's Gustav Söderström. For anyone looking for a good introduction — not a series, no storytelling, just 1.5 hours of solid explanation: This is the podcast you want. It's from...
No Permission, no pay: How my Book became AI training fodder
I was at the Leipziger Buchmesse (Leipzig Book Fair) to talk about AI. First off: I was robbed. Supposedly, Meta (and probably others) trained its AI using LibGen, a shadow library with millions of books and articles. A book that Christian Stoecker, Konrad Lischka and I wrote 13 years ago is part of the LibGen...
Anthropic looks under the hood of Claude 3.5 Haiku, using circuit tracing to see how it works across different kinds of tasks.
SEO, but for AI search engines: Is it really that simple, optimizing for semantic search rather than keywords, just match the pattern of the search query? (Threads)
Inside Google’s Two-Year Frenzy to Catch Up With OpenAI: Late nights, layoffs—and lowering guardrails (Paresh Dave and Arielle Pardes, Wired)
AI search has had little impact on referral traffic to date, based on Comscore’s desktop user data in the U.S. (Nick Hagar, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
Teach AI your face in a few clicks: A beginner’s guide to finetuning FLUX
Low-Rank Adaptation, LoRA, allows for fine-tuning without the need to retrain the entire model. You can teach FLUX a specific style or a specific aesthetic, even a face. A while back, there was a big trend of uploading a dozen photos to some shady app, maybe paying a few euros, and getting a set of...
AI Search Has A Citation Problem. We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News. (Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar, Columbia Journalism Review)
“Liberal AI Grok Attacks Trump, Turns on Creator Musk in Shocking Betrayal”
What happens when you cram all the world's knowledge, or at least what you can find, into a machine? The machine gets a sense of what's considered normal. I know, loaded term. Let's call it a baseline. This even applies to Elon Musk's supposed super AI, Grok 3. "Should a U.S. president say 'He who...
Put AI at the beginning, not at the end
(This is my contribution to Nieman Lab's Predictions for Journalism, 2025) Many newsrooms and publishers are looking for ways to use generative AI, and they’re making one crucial mistake: They’re hoping for the one magic button. They’re hoping for AI that can quickly turn an article into a podcast, web story, or newsletter. For AI...
