The public isn’t impressed: If you ask people what AI in news will do for them, the answer is mostly “make it worse.” High assumed use, low expected benefit. News media rank below search engines and social media on public AI optimism. One reason: journalists are unusually good at publicizing their own AI screw-ups. (Rasmus Kleis Nielsen)

Six provocations from Reuters Institute researcher Felix Simon: The low-hanging fruit of AI in journalism has been picked, human-in-the-loop is becoming a polite fiction, and “responsible AI” labels won’t fix the trust problem.

How much AI went into a text is hard to guess from the outside, but the CEO of AI detection tool Pangram wants to make it his business: “We’re trying to understand degrees of AI assistance. To be able to say this text was translated by AI, or this had a light polish pass, versus this was generated wholesale from a prompt.” (Ochuko Akpovbovbo, as seen on)

“The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.”

Clean, precise prose is now a liability. Non-native English speakers and autistic writers are being flagged as AI because they write too well. Meanwhile, the actual bots are getting sloppier on purpose, reports Emma Alpern in New York Magazine. Glad this is getting more attention.

“Human in the loop” sounds like oversight. Our cognitive biases turn it into a rubber stamp. Damon Kiesow on how to make checking AI output hurt a little, like red-teaming and forced rewrites. (Working Systems)

The forensic heatmap supposedly exposing a photo as fake? Also fake. Forensic cosplay to create doubt about real photos. (shirin anlen, Mahsa Alimardani, Tech Policy Press)

Journalist suspended for publishing AI-hallucinated quotes: A former editor-in-chief of NRC used ChatGPT, Perplexity, and NotebookLM for his newsletter, but didn’t verify quotes. He had warned colleagues about exactly this. (Dan Milmo, Guardian)

Can you tell which passage was written by AI? This New York Times quiz is humbling either way. (Kevin Roose and Stuart A. Thompson)

Grammarly “cloned” Julia Angwin, Stephen King, and Neil deGrasse Tyson as AI editors, without asking. Angwin is now suing. The feature is gone, the apology is filed, and the AI Julia apparently gave bad advice. (Miles Klee, Wired)

An Ars Technica story about an AI agent writing a hit piece on a human contained AI-fabricated quotes attributed to the human. The author was sick, rushing, and used ChatGPT. The article was pulled. (Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media)

Substack hosts, algorithmically promotes, and takes a revenue cut from newsletters openly pushing Nazi ideology, Holocaust denial, and white supremacy. (Geraldine McKelvie, The Guardian)