Overheard student coming out of a lecture: “AI has ruined cheating on essays because before you could just pay someone to write your essay but now if you do that you have no guarantee they haven’t just used AI.”

Another one to add to the news industry’s AI wall of shame

“Benj Edwards, one of the authors of the Ars Technica article, explained on Bluesky that he was responsible for the AI-generated quotes. He said he was sick that day and rushing to finish his work, and accidentally used a Chat-GPT paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s blog rather than a direct quote.”

“With the help of A.I., I wrote a tool that leveraged the D.O.J.’s own search functionality to allow reporters to quickly extract every page of search results and put them in a spreadsheet.” @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com

I keep seeing examples of news being considered as just as one element of information rather than its own thing. It makes sense to me as a consumer. I wonder if senior leaders in information services (including legacy news orgs) are thinking about this.

If I were in the business of trying to fill newspapers as cheaply as possible... I would... ... automate the process of making infographics from opensource data and make them really big and really pretty... obvs fact checking them before publication.

The great @andrewdeck.bsky.social has done a deep dive into how the New York Times uses GenAI to monitor podcasts. "When one of the shows publishes a new episode, the tool automatically downloads it, transcribes it, and summarizes the transcript... "

Last year Anthropic agreed to pay authors. However, that settlement is far from final in the courts and it’s possible it may not actually happen.

Added more information about Microsoft's new Publisher Content Marketplace tow.cjr.org/ai-deals-law...

Amazon is reportedly preparing to launch a marketplace for publishers to sell their content to firms offering AI products www.reuters.com/business/ret...

The 'evidence dilemma' in general purpose AI: “AI systems are rapidly becoming more capable, but evidence on their risks is slow to emerge and difficult to assess."

I think more and more about whether the news industry is just a few years behind the music industry in terms of being paid for our content. What will this mean for journalists and for society?

I think back to scraping workshops in investigative journalism conferences a few years back. They really were just scraping the surface (!). Fast forward a few years and we found out that our content was being scraped at an industrial scale while we were just trying to find a few tip offs.

Microsoft published a blog earlier this month about their content licensing marketplace. I am only just getting round to reading it now. I'll read it and pick out some key bits here. about.ads.microsoft.com/en/blog/post...

A new bill in the NY state legislature would require news orgs to label any content “substantially composed, authored, or created" with generative AI. It would also require that humans review that content before publication. More details @niemanlab.org. www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/a-ne...

Updated the tracker to include OpenAI and Axios's partnership to expand Axios Local coverage to nine new communities tow.cjr.org/ai-deals-law...

ElevenLabs has raised $500 million in a Series D funding and intends to use it on ElevenAgents, its enterprise platform for voice and conversational AI, "to support customer experience, sales and marketing, and internal workflows with interactive voice agents". elevenlabs.io/blog/series-d

My brother and I "pair vibe code" every Saturday morning. I've taken this screen grab of part of what we were doing today on n8n to make the point that no code is often not no code. There is so much previous knowledge of coding needed here. Someone who has never coded would be lost

This law firm predicts we'll see "aggressive plaintiff strategies to unlock proprietary training information through discovery" in the AI intellectual property court cases this year. www.debevoise.com/insights/pub...

NEW: News publishers are limiting Internet Archive access to prevent AI crawlers from using the digital library as a backdoor to their content. @hanaatameez.bsky.social and I confirmed The Guardian and The New York Times have put in place new restrictions. www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/news...

I'd love to find the perfect workflow for a journalist who records everything. So I'm excited to hear there are rumours of Apple making a wearable pin with a microphone and camera. There has been push back to mis-use of meta's glasses so lots to iron out in the consent/privacy field first.

I recently finished a post grad diploma in journalism, innovation and leadership and my conclusion was: it's challenging right now for news orgs to make long term plans When they don't know: What's Jony Ive building? Will it change the interface through which we consume info? Will it take off?

Bloomberg has launched a chat bot called ASKB, according to @tedmerz.bsky.social on LinkedIn:

I've been thinking about how transcription and then semantic search help me with my work carrying out long qualitative interviews with my job. And then I thought about how it will not just be journalists who are helped. And THEN I thought about...

I am too nervous to try out the new presenter of In Our Time for my insomnia. Melvin Bragg was just perfect. He kept those academics in a perfect state of orderly calm that I found helped lull me to sleep within 25 minutes. Could insomniacs be could be a use case for synthetic voices?

Cloudflare has bought AI data marketplace Human Native. This is important because it's a twist in the ongoing question of "is anyone going to get paid to create content in the AI age?"

“It’s sort of the anti-Nextdoor and Citizen…rather than using crime and fear as a way to get people engaged, what if you used humor?” www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/high...

Who here has worked with documents from PACER (US court documents?)

Spoke with @clarespencer.bsky.social about how we turned 200-page manifestos into a Tinder-style voting game at @publico.pt . generative-ai-newsroom.com/inside-p%C3%...

My latest story has taken me back to the first time I ever voted. I was 19. During the day I was working as an office junior in a paper merchants. At night I cleaned offices, in the mornings and weekends I cleaned supermarkets. I didn't have time to pay attention to the news...

The part of Reuters’ digital trends report I am really excited about is the hint newsrooms intend to focus more on original journalism and investigations. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-m...

Well done Press Gazette for trying to put an end to a specific form of low quality inaccurate content in news stories. Slop existed before AI but because of AI it is even more important than ever to try and reduce the flow of slop. pressgazette.co.uk/news/named-5...

ICYMI OpenAI launched the OpenAI Academy for News Organizations. academy.openai.com/public/clubs...

It’s going to be interesting to watch how meta glasses fare over 2026. I am divided.

There has been a discussion rumbling on for years now about how newsrooms will fundamentally change to deliver information in a format for machines rather than a finished product for humans. GenAI has reinvigorated this discussion. And it appears again in the Nieman Lab predictions for 2026:

Publishers with AI licensing deals have seven times the clickthrough rate But only a select group of publishers have deals with the LLMs pressgazette.co.uk/comment-anal...

Six authors are suing Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI and Perplexity for what they call “a straightforward and deliberate act of theft that constitutes copyright infringement.” The lawsuits over AI training show no signs of abating. aboutblaw.com/bkv0

Getty has been given permission to appeal parts of the Stability AI ruling, looking at the meaning of the term "infringing copy" pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/ai...

I experimented with an AI tool recently to see how useful it would be for journalists and it got me thinking about how work would have been easier on a specific story I wrote years before. After interviewing a manager at a factory I received a message threatening lawyers. It was hairy...

A trend that ratcheted up in 2025 - News organisations added the chatbot feature. Washington Post Time Magazine USA Today Daily Star … are some that come to mind.

I keep noticing people mention information needs instead of news needs. This doesn't have to be a competition - people have a need for information. Some of that information is new (news) and some of that information was true a while back.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

I have just remembered a situation from this spring when I happened to be sitting in on some AI training someone was giving. He had a beautiful style. I loved listening to him. The problem was his example wasn’t true.

Campaigner for protection of musicians’ copyright Ed Newton Rex has said that UK govt published a breakdown of the responses to its consultation on AI & copyright today: He picked out this: Only 3.5% want a new copyright exception for AI training

Interesting use of AI to monitor vast amounts of content - when your beat includes a senator who publishes around three podcasts a week. Texas tribune’s @jasperscherer.bsky.social used gigafact Parser to analyse and look for trends in Ted Cruz’s podcast. gigafact.org/parser/

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry

Prorata has signed a licensing partnership with The Danish Press Publications' Collective Management Organisation, whose members can opt into the AI start-up's answer engine giving pre-negotiated credit and compensation www.prnewswire.com/news-release...

"The errors have ranged from relatively minor pronunciation gaffes to significant changes to story content, like misattributing or inventing quotes and inserting commentary, such as interpreting a source’s quotes as the paper’s position on an issue."

🟡 NEW: The Washington Post’s top standards editor decried “frustrating” errors in its new AI-generated personalized podcasts, whose launch has been met with distress by its journalists. www.semafor.com/article/12/1...

Disney has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google claiming its AI training models and service infringe on its copyrights on a "massive scale" deadline.com/2025/12/disn...