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...
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Contrastive negation used to be a rhetorical device, now it screams “I used ChatGPT”
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...
You can just build things
My website was put together with a text editor and a "better done than perfect" attitude. I added new things here and there. Fiddled around. Over time, it got messy. And I never built a dark mode, because I feared the time it would take to rebuild everything. But you're looking at a much improved...
Is the image even real? Can we verify the facts?
Those questions framed the conversation at last Thursday's AI for Media Network gathering in Hamburg. 120+ representatives from media organizations and academia met to discuss AI in verification and research. It was the first time the event was hosted at SPIEGEL-Gruppe's Hamburg offices. Gerret von Nordheim, deputy head of SPIEGEL's fact-checking department, presented our in-house...
Links to a talk on trust and AI
Taken out of context without the talk at AI for Media somewhat incomprehensible. Google DeepMind: SynthID olereissmann.com: Hands on with SynthID Guardian: AI images of Maduro capture reap millions of views on social media Guardian: White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest MDR: Sächsische Polizeigewerkschaft verteidigt KI-Bild Samira El Ouassil:...
Bring AI into your CMS with a Chrome plugin
This gets a little technical, but with AI's help it's straightforward. Here's how it works: a Chrome plugin grabs content from the CMS text fields, sends it to ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude with various preset prompts, and displays the response right in the browser. For example: checking against your house style. A plausibility check. Suggestions...
Model of the moment
If you aren’t using Qwen3-Max-Thinking already, you’re … just like me. As much as I try to stay current, I also have to get real work done. So for me it’s the latest Claude Opus and the latest Gemini, for both writing and coding. I bounce between the two: most days I start with Opus,...
26 AI and Journalism Links for 2026
Look, I get it. Your inbox is drowning in trend reports. Another one just dropped. And another. Plus seventeen meta-analyses of the meta-analyses, and at this point everyone's just rage-feeding the whole mess into NotebookLM like it's some kind of AI garbage disposal. It's exhausting. Truly. I've done the scrolling. Consider this your cheat code....
“I Don’t Trust AI an Inch When It Comes to Facts”: Matthias Fiedler asked me 22 questions for his newsletter StoryCodes
Matthias Fiedler is a colleague of mine at SPIEGEL – he covers sports from Munich. In his newsletter StoryCodes, he gives journalists tips on AI, and occasionally he interviews a guest. And this time I got to be the one! Since his newsletter is published in German, here's my English translation: GPT-5. When the mechanics...
My view on labeling AI generated content
Don't. At least not when AI is only used as an auxiliary tool, say in producing an article. When a journalist has used ChatGPT to structure their notes. When an AI proofreads and suggests improvements. Whenever a journalist decides not to use AI as a shortcut, but as a tool. When a journalist remains in...
Will ChatGPT-5 break me?
Short answer: maybe. Longer answer: I'm a runner. On September 21, I'll be shoulder to shoulder with 50,000 other masochists at the Berlin Marathon, trying to shave three minutes off my time from the previous year. (Idea initially shared in my newsletter, then made into a posting.) I have a solid training plan. Problem is:...
I tried ChatGPT Agent and Perplexity Comet to actually get things done
I've been playing with ChatGPT Agent and Perplexity Comet—and I'm not sure if I'm witnessing the future of productivity or just an elaborate way to make simple tasks more complicated. The premise sounds great: tell an AI what you want, and it'll just… do it. Book your train tickets, find that obscure book, curate a...
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...
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...
How AI Companies Turn Your Browser Into Their Business Model
OpenAI will launch a browser, Perplexity has just released Comet, and YouTubers are going full clickbait mode: "NEW AI Browser is INSANE!🤯" (Really? It's insane to chat with tabs? That word gets used pretty liberally these days, considering it's AI-bros getting excited about summarizing five YouTube videos simultaneously while doing important thought leadership. Anyhow.) The...
