Users of German news site Süddeutsche who were shown a difficult quiz about AI-generated images afterwards trusted media less and visited the news site a little bit more often – and now everyone’s hoping that quality journalism still has a chance. (Sarah Scire, Nieman Journalism Lab)
AI & Journalism Links
This started out as a spreadsheet. Now it's a blog. And a Newsletter.
Less than nine seconds of watching TV: That’s the energy consumption Google reports for the “median Gemini Apps text prompt” in May 2025, which includes “all LLM models serving the Gemini app, including all supporting models for scoring, ranking, classification, and other prompt routing tasks” and accounts for idle machines and overhead.
Stories too good to be true, payment via Paypal: At least six publications have taken down articles under the name Margaux Blanchard that were AI-generated. (Maya Yang, Guardian)
Get to know your IT department better: Making Sense of AI Job Titles (Drew Breunig)
Not sure this is categorically true, but: “LLMs suck at journalism because LLMs suck at stories. LLMs suck at discovering surprising facts of all kinds, because LLMs are designed to minimize surprises.” (Dan Fabulich, Medium)
“AI models are not politically neutral nor free from bias. More importantly, it may not even be possible for them to be unbiased. Throughout history, attempts to organise information have shown that one person’s objective truth is another’s ideological bias.” (Declan Humphreys, The Conversation)
Welcome, future newsroom leaders: JournalismAI has recruited 20 participants from 17 nations for its “Skills Lab”, empowering non-technical staff in the responsible use of AI.
You do not have to use generative ai “art” because there are websites where you can get real, nice images for free (Jenn Schiffer, Live Laugh Blog)
Google steady but social and direct referrals are down: Chartbeat data shows traffic trends to 565 US and UK publishers since 2019 (Charlotte Tobitt, PressGazette)
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The catastrophe of knowledge work waits to be beautiful again, and interesting, and modern: From “Mad Men” to the AI era, the problems of underconsumption. (Matt Pearce, Substack)
How Hearst’s DevHub is Building AI Tools That Work for Local News (Ulrike Langer, News Machines)
The publishers’ guide to being gaslit by tech platforms (the AI edition) (Seb Joseph, Sara Guaglione, DigiDay)
21 Ways People Are Using A.I. at Work (Larry Buchanan, Francesca Paris, New York Times). Previously: 18 journalists and news executives share how they use AI
Signs of AI writing: How Wikipedia tries to identify synthetic content.
No emotions, no praise, no mind: Extremism-scholar J.M. Berger’s three laws of chatbotics (Bluesky)
