AI is disrupting business models, warns Joshua Rothman: “We could be left with A.I.-summarized wire reports, Substacks, and not much else.” At the same time, he finds working with AI search “efficient, fun, and intellectually stimulating.” (The New Yorker)
AI & Journalism Links
This started out as a spreadsheet. Now it's a blog. And a Newsletter.
Judicial panel overrides author preferences, bundles diverse copyright claims against AI companies into single NY proceeding. (Ella Creamer, The Guardian)
The doomsday fantasy of effective altruists: The “AI in 2027” report imagines wild scenarios. Kevin Roose is less impressed. (New York Times)
OpenAI’s latest Ghibli meme trend brazenly exploits Miyazaki’s longstanding criticism of AI. (Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine)
Is this already ‘agentic’? Google’s NotebookLM now searches and incorporates relevant web content.
Preparing a feast only to have it eaten by ghosts who don’t leave a tip: Wikipedia plans to regulate bot access and wants new attribution guidelines for web, apps, voice assistants, and LLMs. (Wikimedia)
We see clunky AI applications and resist the hype – this article makes the argument that we’re not caring enough about it. (Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker)
Dystopian vision or pragmatic future? Newsquest’s AI-powered content creators stir fears of eroded journalistic standards. (Bron Maher, Press Gazette)
SEO is shifting to crack AI search: focus on repetition and ‘answer-first’ structured content over rankings. (Threads)
Anthropic looks under the hood of Claude 3.5 Haiku, using circuit tracing to see how it works across different kinds of tasks.
SEO, but for AI search engines: Is it really that simple, optimizing for semantic search rather than keywords, just match the pattern of the search query? (Threads)
Inside Google’s Two-Year Frenzy to Catch Up With OpenAI: Late nights, layoffs—and lowering guardrails (Paresh Dave and Arielle Pardes, Wired)
AI search has had little impact on referral traffic to date, based on Comscore’s desktop user data in the U.S. (Nick Hagar, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
Roganbot, created by two journalists, is the testbed for “visibility tools” that help keep tabs on the internet. (Neel Dhanesha, NiemanLab)
AI Search Has A Citation Problem. We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News. (Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar, Columbia Journalism Review)
