I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. (Kylie Robison, Wired)
Hi, I'm Ole Reissmann, a journalist who builds things. I'm the first Director of AI at SPIEGEL. Before that: podcasts, news product development, platform strategy. I write about AI and journalism and send a newsletter you might enjoy.
How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart: Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent. (Varsha Bansal, The Guardian)
How to get less hallucinations: “What often is deemed a ‘wrong’ response is often merely a first pass at describing the beliefs out there. And the solution is the same: iterate the process.” (Mike Caulfield, The End(s) of Argument)
AI bots endlessly scrape publisher sites, causing costly downtime and meager traffic. (Charlotte Tobitt, PressGazette)
AI Search, Users, and News: A trove of data from LM Arena offers a glimpse into user search behavior. A few sources garnered the majority of impressions. (Nick Diakopoulos, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
How Elon Musk Is Remaking Grok in His Image: “Grok’s rightward shift has occurred alongside Mr. Musk’s own frustrations with the chatbot’s replies. He wrote in July that ‘all AIs are trained on a mountain of woke’ information that is very difficult to remove after training.” (New York Times)
What happens to carefully crafted journalism when readers expect AI-generated, personalized stories created instantly? Semafor’s Gina Chua on how AI will upend the news.
Werewolf leaderboard: GPT-5 is the best at bluffing and manipulating the other AIs in Werewolf. (Foaster Labs)
From Star Wars insult to TikTok meme: “Clanker has become a go-to slur against A.I. on social media, led by Gen Z and Gen Alpha posters.” (Eli Tan, New York Times)
“It’s the return of the shoe-leather reporter, empowered by an AI partner. One gathers trust, information and relationships. The other who assembles.” (David Cohn, LinkedIn)
A short clip of a Will Smith concert looks like a crappy AI fake – but it’s not: “The crowds were real, but the videos were manipulated: first by Will Smith’s team, and then without asking, by YouTube.” (Andy Baio, waxy.org)
