Chinese e‑commerce giant Alibaba has released new Qwen models for generating and cloning voices earlier this year. Which means: With only a couple of seconds of recorded material, we can generate a cloned voice recording. On a four year old MacBook Air. Instantly. At no cost. This used to be the domain of Elevenlabs. The...
An editor gets a promising pitch, starts googling, and finds a byline that exists everywhere and nowhere. A podcast episode about a scammer – and that some sources didn’t care about being faked. (Question Everything)
A young reader got so frustrated with the FT’s news product that she built her own using Claude Code. She’s paying for a subscription, she wants personalized news, and she couldn’t figure out how to get it. (Jodie Hopperton, INMA)
The information ecosystem has four new rules: production is cheap, machines are the audience, content is liquid, and intention beats attention. Shuwei Fang buries the current publishing model, and somehow ends up optimistic: journalism needs to stop protecting the article and start selling the process. (Reuters Institute)
tropes.md is a one-file blacklist of AI writing tells for your system prompt.
This is the future, not a newsletter. When you define something by saying what it's not, it's called "contrastive negation." Nowadays, it's a telltale of AI writing. You can see it all over Threads and LinkedIn. At the same time, the bros are feeding chatbots the Wikipedia definition of "AI writing" and telling them to...
The vibe is Palantir cosplay: World Monitor by Elie Habib is a real-time “situational awareness” dashboard with threat feeds, geopolitical maps, and a three-stage AI classification pipeline. He calls it a “weekend hack.”
“Not ‘how do I get paid for my articles by AI’ but ‘how do I architect my knowledge so it can reach customers I’ve never had access to before'”: A three-layer AI monetization framework, with O’Reilly as proof of concept. (Florent Daudens, AI in the News)
BBC, FT, Guardian, Sky News, and The Telegraph are launching Spur, a coalition to set shared licensing standards for AI use of journalism. Not a collective licensing body, but wants to shape what pricing looks like. More publishers welcome. (Charlotte Tobitt, Press Gazette)
238k speeches: Guardian and UCL trained a non-generative ML model on 100 years of House of Commons debates. Both Labour and Conservative MPs are currently at or near their most hostile on immigration, driven by competition with Reform UK.
Which AI to use: Free users don’t get the good AI, and even if you pay, you have to pick thinking mode. Once you’ve done that, the model matters less than the harness. For newsrooms: curated archive retrieval, a system prompt encoding editorial voice, CMS integration, verification. (Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing)
