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.

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 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)

“Shell Game” is back: Evan Ratliff’s podcast returns. The first new episode comes alongside a major Wired feature: “Sam Altman says the one-person billion-dollar company is coming. Maybe I could be that person—if only I could get my colleagues to shut up and stop lying.” (Podcast, Article)

Swiss Tagesanzeiger reports on the business of junk content and automated pseudo-news. Fakes were spread about one of the article’s authors. The journalists spoke with a junk site operator who comes from the SEO world (of course) and thinks it’s all wonderful.

Why you shouldn’t use AI browsers like Atlas or Comet with logins to email, SharePoint or any other online service right now—even though that’s a major part of what makes an AI browser interesting. (Simon Willison’s Weblog)

Generative AI and news report 2025: “We document rapid growth in the use of a new set of tools bound to impact the discovery of information, how people use it, and, by extension over time, changing competition for both attention, advertising, and the money people are willing to spend on media and content.” (Felix Simon, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Richard Fletcher, Reuters Institute)

Ever heard of “Chatbait”? That’s how chatbots keep you talking for maximum engagement. (Lila Shroff, The Atlantic)

The News Industry’s GenAI Cautionary Tales: Generative AI failures have shown, among other things, the value of scrutinizing outsourced work. (Clare Spencer, Generative AI in the Newsroom)

How Elon Musk Is Remaking Grok in His Image: “Grok’s rightward shift has occurred alongside Mr. Musk’s own frustrations with the chatbot’s replies. He wrote in July that ‘all AIs are trained on a mountain of woke’ information that is very difficult to remove after training.” (New York Times)