“When journalism is restructured around algorithmic requirements, it fundamentally alters what kinds of stories get told, how they’re framed, and who ultimately controls the narrative.”
Johannes Klingebiel, July 2025
Attention Heads: Quotes on AI & Journalism
“We don’t—we can’t—remember everything. Humans are at least as lossy as AI is, but the details we keep matter. Two people can attend a party and leave with entirely different impressions; 300 million can witness the same election and debate whether a fraud or landslide has occurred.”
Writer Jasmine Sun, January 2025
“Soon people won’t be able to escape AI; it will be integrated into everything they own and use. Our audiences’ expectations of the digital world in general, and of the media, are going to shift radically. And their needs will change too. We can’t just polish our current solutions.”
The Telegraph’s Michelle Brister, May 2025
“We may be at a tipping point in journalism and in the social sciences that study it that is as much cultural as it is technical. AI has directly threatened the primary activity of these fields – the production of language, knowledge, analysis and ideas – at precisely the same moment as they have lost cultural and political influence as a consequence of wider social and political trends.”
Media consultant David Caswell, April 2025
“A thing that journalists do that language models cannot is come and have this conversation with me. You’re going out and talking to people every day at the very edge of their experience. That’s always changing. And language models just don’t have access to that, because it’s not on the internet.”
“You call it data—I call it IP. We operate in an ecosystem shaped by big tech companies. The best outcome for everyone is commercial agreements that reflect fair value exchange and give The Times control over how its commercial property is used.”
“What surprises me is that some traditional journalists still seem to view AI as something optional, technology they could simply choose not to use. It’s reminiscent of how some editors used to think about websites or social media.”
The New York Times’ Rubina Fillion, May 2025
“Some people are so pleased with themselves for discovering that LLMs are statistical systems with error rates that they forget to notice that everyone in the field knows this, and more importantly, forget to notice that this doesn’t make them useless. You might call such people clever fools.”
Analyst Benedict Evans, June 2025
