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)
Tags trust (50)
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)
From Star Wars insult to TikTok meme: “Clanker has become a go-to slur against A.I. on social media, led by Gen Z and Gen Alpha posters.” (Eli Tan, New York Times)
A short clip of a Will Smith concert looks like a crappy AI fake – but it’s not: “The crowds were real, but the videos were manipulated: first by Will Smith’s team, and then without asking, by YouTube.” (Andy Baio, waxy.org)
Users of German news site Süddeutsche who were shown a difficult quiz about AI-generated images afterwards trusted media less and visited the news site a little bit more often – and now everyone’s hoping that quality journalism still has a chance. (Sarah Scire, Nieman Journalism Lab)
Stories too good to be true, payment via Paypal: At least six publications have taken down articles under the name Margaux Blanchard that were AI-generated. (Maya Yang, Guardian)
The publishers’ guide to being gaslit by tech platforms (the AI edition) (Seb Joseph, Sara Guaglione, DigiDay)
How the Associated Press Built its AI Strategy Without Breaking Trust (Ulrike Langer, News Machines)
Time spent on ChatGPT is approaching that spent on social platforms. (Coatue’s 2025 Market Report via Lucy Küng)
Another fun one: Cloudflare CEO warns of AI-driven “existential threat” to publishers as search traffic dwindles amid bot-fueled content skimming. (Christine Wang, Axios)
People expect that AI will make news cheaper, more current, and easier to understand, one of the findings of the 2025 Digital News Report. (Nic Newman, Reuters Institute)
Politico’s chatbot for pro users, the Policy Intelligence Assistant, is spitting out made-up stuff when asked, like about a non-existent “League of Left-Handed Plumbers,” according to Semafor.
What would we build today?
What would we build today for people who need trusted, verified information, knowing nothing about newsrooms? That was Nikita Roy's question at the Nordic AI in Media Summit in Copenhagen, hashtag#NAMS25. Rethinking journalism from first principles. One of the many puzzle pieces came from Helsingin Sanomat editor-in-chief Erja Yläjärvi: "Writing is not a core skill...
