Is this the end of licensing deals? Sam Altman told Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that having AI agents paying micropayments per article crawled is his preferred model for compensating publishers. (Andre Deck, Nieman Lab)
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.
A book about AI and truth contains quotes made up by AI. The author says it was an accident and blames ChatGPT and Claude. (Benjamin Mullin, New York Times)
Mizal, Toothcomb, Velora, Mycroft: Four Tools That Just Do Things
In the beginning was the chatbot, and the chatbot was with AI, and the chatbot was AI. Next was moving from prompts to systems. Plugging emails, data, other software into these systems became easier, organizing context, the scaffolding. All the while models got "thinking" abilities and worked longer on tasks, correcting and steering themselves along...
Eli “Filter Bubble” Pariser is back with a 70-slide deck calling AI agents the new feed algorithm, and sees a trust economy emerging: small, high-reputation communities beat mass reach, and whoever figures out the rules for the human-agent public square first wins.
Paul Ford can explain coding and vibecoding, and in this podcast episode, he does both, with a healthy dose of “Man, nobody knows.” (Channels, Peter Kafka)
I’ve linked to him before, and this is a level-headed reality check: “Zitron’s skepticism would be more useful if he accepted the fact that people are widely using AI agents for coding and paying money for this out of rational economic self-interest” (Kelsey Piper, The Argument)
Toothcomb is a free, open-source tool for fact-checks in real time, straight in your browser, transcription build in, bring your own Claude API keys. Upload an MP3, go live with a mic, or paste text. (Rob Dawson)
A brief look at how German news agency dpa is building a “trusted information layer” designed to plug its verified news, data, and partner sources directly into the AI workflows of its clients. (Teemu Henriksson, WAN-IFRA)
Do legacy reach-publishers have a future? People Inc’s 40 media brands are losing search traffic, but the company says 41% of digital revenue no longer depends on website visits. It’s social video, AI licensing deals, a recipe platform, and an app where people stick around. (Charlotte Tobitt, Press Gazette)
What happens when you give an AI agent a credit card and two weeks alone? Hannah Fry built an agent with OpenClaw, handed it $100, and filmed the results. (YouTube)
Vibecoding puts health records and customer data out in the open: A security researcher found hundreds of websites were leaking data through a commonly used service called Supabase (which blamed its new type of user.) (Eva Wolfangel, Die Zeit)
Vibecoding a data visualization dashboard for a Philippine health survey turned out to be “AI does the boring parts while you have to make a lot of editorial calls.” Jaemark Tordecilla covers the wins (data cleaning, pivoting fast, chart generation) and the walls he hit. (Generative AI in the Newsroom)
