Vibe coding starter guide for newsrooms (Joe Amditis, Center for Cooperative Media)
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.
Sci-fi author and digital activist Cory Doctorow on the AI bubble: “The promise AI companies make to investors is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company. (…) But AI can’t do your job.”
Google is rolling out Preferred Sources globally and has unveiled new AI features as well as new partnerships with news publications. SPIEGEL is one of the partners. (Google)
“The Washington Post last week rolled out AI-generated podcasts, ignoring internal reviews that found errors in AI scripts, like fabricated quotes, and had deemed more than two-thirds of them unpublishable.” (Max Tani, Semafor)
A Kenyan author on the supposed markers of AI-generated text: “The very things you identify as the fingerprints of the machine are, in fact, the fossil records of our education.” (Marcus Olang’, This Man’s Mind)
To mark ChatGPT’s third birthday, the Guardian’s Robert Booth tours Silicon Valley in search of the future: “Everyone is working all the time,” said Madhavi Sewak, a senior leader at Google DeepMind, in a recent talk. “It’s extremely intense. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of natural stopping point, and everyone is really kind of getting ground down. Even the folks who are very wealthy now … all they do is work.”
Thoughts on ChatGPT apps and why they aren’t mini versions of existing news products: “The entire premise of building a ChatGPT App is to expose capabilities, not pages. This is the existential shift for news orgs accustomed to owning the screen.” (Florent Daudens, LinkedIn)
Slop Evader: A search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022. (Tega Brain)
In left-leaning media outlets like n+1, resistance against AI is taking shape: “When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. (…) There’s still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool.”
Three examples of AI translation at Chicago’s La Voz, The Economist, and BBC News Polska. What unfortunately isn’t mentioned: What happens to quotes that need to be translated back into their original language. (Clare Spencer, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever discusses the current state of generative AI, and talks about his new company SSI and what he plans to do with the three billion dollars he’s raised: develop learning AI systems. (Dwarkesh Podcast)
JournalismAI Festival 2025: No more FOMO – 23 recorded sessions are now available. Jane Barrett on what’s coming next? Chris Moran on Newsroom Singularity? Sorry, can’t right now, gonna be watching for a while.
