In this issue: Why watermarks and authenticity labels won’t save us. A startup that wants to surveil writers to prove they’re human. Nic Newman on what 14 years of tracking media trends taught him about AI hype. Plus: A journalist’s system prompt that tells Claude to hallucinate less.
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.
Substack hosts, algorithmically promotes, and takes a revenue cut from newsletters openly pushing Nazi ideology, Holocaust denial, and white supremacy. (Geraldine McKelvie, The Guardian)
There’s no neat technical fix for that: The more useful an agent is, the more access it needs, and the more access it has, the riskier it gets. Yes, it’s about the Moltbot/OpenClaw agent craze, but also, it’s not. (Dan Hon, Things That Caught My Attention)
Moltbook, the viral “social network for bots,” looked like a glimpse of the AI agent future. It wasn’t. And some of it was humans shitposting. (Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review)
What is Claude? Anthropic doesn’t know either. Gideon Lewis-Kraus spent months inside the company, watching researchers try to understand their own AI. A good example of how to write about this technology without falling for the hype or waving it all away. (The New Yorker)
Why authenticity labels and AI watermarks are failing: Verge reporter Jess Weatherbed explains on the Decoder podcast why media authentication standards like C2PA are going nowhere. And why watermarking AI content isn’t working either.
Your AI agent is a snitch: We’re chatting on Signal, enjoying encryption, right? But your DIY productivity agent is piping the whole thing back to Anthropic. (John Scott-Railton, X)
A Finnish newsroom’s AI rules: Helsingin Sanomat’s guidelines (Esa Mäkinen, LinkedIn)
ChatGPT is getting ads, starting with US users: people on the free tier and on the $8 Go plan are being shown ads tailored to answers, in prominent photo boxes. If only OpenAI would link to journalistic content with the same enthusiasm. (Emma Roth, The Verge)
Can AI help crack the 1986 Olof Palme assassination? Anton Berg and Martin Johnson are using AI to reanalyze the huge archive of police material. Their podcast Spår follows the work (in Swedish).
Microsoft is launching a Publisher Content Marketplace to license articles into AI products like Copilot, promising publishers control, transparency, and usage-based payment for content that grounds conversational answers.
Bring AI into your CMS with a Chrome plugin
This gets a little technical, but with AI's help it's straightforward. Here's how it works: a Chrome plugin grabs content from the CMS text fields, sends it to ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude with various preset prompts, and displays the response right in the browser. For example: checking against your house style. A plausibility check. Suggestions...
