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)
Posts about read
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.
How to use AI without getting dumb: Strategies for critical prompt design to keep AI from becoming a cheap shortcut or decision-maker. (Paul Bradshaw, Online Journalism Blog)
Google says no: “We really don’t want you to think you need to be doing that or produce two versions of your content, one for the LLM and one for the net.” (Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land)
The name says “Code,” but you don’t need to write any: Florent Daudens walks journalists through setting up Claude Code as a persistent reporting assistant that can read your files, track your story, and stop asking you to re-upload that PDF for the fifth time.
Ask AI “what’s the biggest pay gap?” and it’ll miss negative numbers. Ask for “the company” with the top score and it’ll ignore ties. Paul Bradshaw tested ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot for data analysis – and catalogues where tools trip up. (Medium)
Scale back service journalism, evergreen content, and general news – instead, focus more on original investigations and on-the-ground reporting. That’s one response to AI. More trends for the year in Nic Newman’s Trend Report. (Reuters Institute)
Read-aloud articles and entire podcasts now come with AI voices. Ironically, it’s a highly trained professional speaker, journalist Victoria Craig, who is now being mistaken for a robot voice. And listeners are complaining. (Financial Times)
The Brutal Economics of Liquid Content: “Only organizations with massive scale or premium brand differentiation can survive these economics.” The article? Commodified. “What if news media were to let go of the artifact as the product and productize the process instead?” (Shuwei Fang, Radically Informed)
Reinforcing competence: AI companies are paying thousands of lawyers, consultants, and other professionals through startups like Mercor and Surge to write out in detail what counts as a job well done in every conceivable context. (Josh Dzieza and Hayden Field, The Verge)
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)
