We're figuring this out. I track, test, and write about how AI is reshaping news, products, and workflows. You'll find linkposts, essays, a weekly(ish) newsletter, a glossary, and experiments. It's a bit of a mess. But so is everything right now.
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/ AI & Journalism
What happens when you give an AI agent a credit card and two weeks alone? Hannah Fry built an agent with OpenClaw, handed it $100, and filmed the results. (YouTube)
Permanent Underclass
A theory that the window to build wealth is closing fast. Once AI and robotics can fully replace human labor, class positions freeze: the rich deploy superintelligent machines, everyone else waits for welfare. Gone viral in Silicon Valley as shorthand for the fear that AI disruption won't just cost people their jobs but permanently strip...
Vibecoding puts health records and customer data out in the open: A security researcher found hundreds of websites were leaking data through a commonly used service called Supabase (which blamed its new type of user.) (Eva Wolfangel, Die Zeit)
Vibecoding a data visualization dashboard for a Philippine health survey turned out to be “AI does the boring parts while you have to make a lot of editorial calls.” Jaemark Tordecilla covers the wins (data cleaning, pivoting fast, chart generation) and the walls he hit. (Generative AI in the Newsroom)
When you use AI to edit your writing, readers think you’re smarter, richer, whiter, and more politically extreme. AI writing assistance systematically distorts how others perceive you, a study shows. Writers still prefer the AI version. (Paul Röttger, LinkedIn)
Casey Newton is rebuilding his newsletter around scoops and original reporting, cutting the link roundups and even analysis. The bigger question: What kinds of editorial businesses cannot be replaced by AI? (Laura Hazard Owen, Nieman Lab)
Was the monthly AI subscription a scam, designed to hide what these services actually cost? GitHub Copilot switched to token-based billing, and OpenAI needs to 10x its revenue by 2030 to keep Oracle from collapsing. Long, angry, and very footnoted. (Ed Zitron)
AI that only knows things from before the Great Depression: Introducing talkie, a 13B language model trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text.
What if your AI agent doesn’t actually work for you? A field report from a Harvard summit on the agentic future of news: when personal AI agents become the primary gatekeepers, whoever shapes the agent’s “model of your intentions” becomes the most powerful editorial force in history. It’s scarier than the attention economy. (Lars Adrian Giske)
Ethics don’t scale. Paul Ford traces how AI labs started as altruistic crusades to save humanity from killer robots and ended up lobbying for bills that limit their liability in mass deaths. (New York Times)
Is raw reporting material, all those notes, photos and audio that never made it into the CMS, the actual product? Journalists verify and judge, AI handles the packaging. Burt Herman of Hacks/Hackers shows a proof-of-concept with NYC mayoral communications.
