Oops: MIT has withdrawn a paper that claimed productivity increases through AI. (Anthony Ha, TechCrunch)
AI & Journalism Links
This started out as a spreadsheet. Now it's a blog. And a Newsletter.
It’s not about chatbots. What Big Tech is really working on: “embedding AI deeply into the fabric of their ecosystems, creating an invisible layer that spans our digital lives.” (Ezra Eeman made a nice visual, LinkedIn)
“The best way to get your client’s message into the output of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the rest is by talking to journalists.” (Ben Smith, Semafor)
Florent Daudens has built an open source version of NotebookLM’s podcast to break down the top AI research paper each day: “Fully automated, now live on Spotify.” (LinkedIn)
What does it actually mean to get your news from AI? Laura Preston laments endless, evasive bullet points. I don’t know what’s worse: journalists thinking they can ignore AI after this, or people reading AI content and just going “good enough.” (Columbia Journalism Review)
Podcast: Using ChatGPT, especially for therapy, may prove difficult to disengage from, as chatbots employ “personalization loops.” (Ryan Broderick, Panic World)
The Financial Times has a brutal takedown of Sam Altman and OpenAI based on a 22-second video of him cooking pasta.
AI search is (likely) hurting publishers: “The data is really messy, and … we have no real way of differentiating … to see what is really going on. But overall, it all points to there being a problem.” (Thomas Baekdal)
Proceed with caution, but don’t stick your head in the sand: 18 journalists and news execs share where they’re drawing their lines with AI tools. Maybe not entirely groundbreaking stuff, but a solid reality check. (Mike Ananny and Matt Pearce, Columbia Journalism Review)
First LLM Classifier: Learn how journalists use large-language models to organize and analyze massive datasets.
“LLM grooming”: Russia automates the dissemination of misinformation by exploiting vulnerabilities in AI search. (Joseph Mann, Washington Post)
Scraperr: A “no-code” data-extraction tool for web scraping with XPath selectors. (We hate it when they do it to us, but we love some scraping for our own use.)
Google searches in Safari declined for the first time ever last month. Does this signal the collapse of the online ecosystem? (Casey Newton, Platformer)
“Hallucinations” are getting worse in “reasoning” models from OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek. Experts struggle to explain why. (Cade Metz, Karen Weise, New York Times)
1 in 3 employees secretly use AI at work. Some like having a ‘secret edge’ (36%), others are afraid it might cost them their job (30%), and some are like, If people find out I’m using AI, they’ll think I can’t do my job (27%), says the 2025 Technology at Work Report.
