To mark ChatGPT’s third birthday, the Guardian’s Robert Booth tours Silicon Valley in search of the future: “Everyone is working all the time,” said Madhavi Sewak, a senior leader at Google DeepMind, in a recent talk. “It’s extremely intense. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of natural stopping point, and everyone is really kind of getting ground down. Even the folks who are very wealthy now … all they do is work.”
AI & Journalism Links
This started out as a spreadsheet. Now it's a blog. And a Newsletter.
Thoughts on ChatGPT apps and why they aren’t mini versions of existing news products: “The entire premise of building a ChatGPT App is to expose capabilities, not pages. This is the existential shift for news orgs accustomed to owning the screen.” (Florent Daudens, LinkedIn)
Slop Evader: A search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022. (Tega Brain)
In left-leaning media outlets like n+1, resistance against AI is taking shape: “When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. (…) There’s still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool.”
Three examples of AI translation at Chicago’s La Voz, The Economist, and BBC News Polska. What unfortunately isn’t mentioned: What happens to quotes that need to be translated back into their original language. (Clare Spencer, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever discusses the current state of generative AI, and talks about his new company SSI and what he plans to do with the three billion dollars he’s raised: develop learning AI systems. (Dwarkesh Podcast)
JournalismAI Festival 2025: No more FOMO – 23 recorded sessions are now available. Jane Barrett on what’s coming next? Chris Moran on Newsroom Singularity? Sorry, can’t right now, gonna be watching for a while.
The Thinking Game: This documentary from 2024 takes us behind the scenes with Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis, showing how they taught their algorithms to play video games, chess, and Go, before moving on to protein folding. It’s compellingly told, though it sidesteps what was happening simultaneously at OpenAI and elsewhere. For free on YouTube.
Palantir is providing Fox News with three AI tools: “Topic Radar” generates custom briefings for reporters, “Text Editor” reviews articles for style and readability, and “Article Insights tracks performance and suggests optimizations. (Sara Fischer, Axios)
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How we use AI in our journalism (Axios)
Case Study: How the Financial Times Approaches Transparency about AI Use in News (Liz Lohn, Felix M. Simon)
12 lessons from news outlets on the cutting edge of AI (Jacob Granger, Journalism UK)
With the new ChatGPT 5.1, you can give the chatbot one of several preset personalities – from cynical, friendly to nerdy. This is supposed to make it nicer, warmer, more entertaining again, like the 4o variants. Otherwise, there’s still general confusion about whether the model is actually new. Ethan Mollick has examples on LinkedIn.
“Shell Game” is back: Evan Ratliff’s podcast returns. The first new episode comes alongside a major Wired feature: “Sam Altman says the one-person billion-dollar company is coming. Maybe I could be that person—if only I could get my colleagues to shut up and stop lying.” (Podcast, Article)
Swiss Tagesanzeiger reports on the business of junk content and automated pseudo-news. Fakes were spread about one of the article’s authors. The journalists spoke with a junk site operator who comes from the SEO world (of course) and thinks it’s all wonderful.
