“Despite appearances, an LLM does not actually output text”: The Guardian’s Joseph Lochlann Smith with a myth-busting deep dive. (Medium)
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.
Image generation, without the “AI look”: Flux.1 Krea is an open weights model with opinionated aesthetics.
“There’s no getting around the decline in traffic”: Another apocalyptic roundup on what’s happening with search. (Klaudia Jaźwińska, Columbia Journalism Review)
AI Mode has over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S. and India, says Google. (Abner Li, 9to5Google)
Scoops by passionate people you trust: Axios CEO Jim VandeHei sees no future for “average” journalists who chronicle events and declares the era of “Super Journalists.” He might be right and tone-deaf.
Make prompt engineering great again: A growing list of tools may help you improve your generative AI prompts, but sometimes all you need is a spreadsheet. (Clare Spencer, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
Substack surveyed 2,000 of its publishers: Male writers embrace AI (55%), women less enthralled (38%) by the so-called productivity boost.
Generative AI models love to cite Reuters and Axios, Muck Rack study finds. Major models cite journalism in nearly half of responses that require recency. (Andrew Deck, NiemanLab)
Surprising no one, new report from The Pew Research Center says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks. (Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica)
AI-generated band “The Velvet Sundown” garners 1M+ Spotify streams, sparking debates over platform transparency and artist compensation. (Lanre Bakare, The Guardian)
AI etiquette: “Whoa, let me stop you right here buddy, what you’re doing here is extremely, horribly rude.” (Alex Martsinovich)
