I love this piece from our brilliant lead engineer on newsroom AI, Joseph Smith. If you're non-technical but looking for a deeper understanding of how LLMs work beyond the basics, it's a fantastically clear and useful place to start medium.com/@joelochlann...

This 40m video is a brilliant articulation of where we are now with LLMs and a thoughtful reflection on autonomy, agency, software and where we go next. I love the phrase "jagged intelligence" and using Memento's protagonist as an articulation of context windows. Do watch youtu.be/LCEmiRjPEtQ?...

This is an excellent, thoughtful, nuanced piece on the role AI can play in writing www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/m...

So much energy is being put into the long-term impact of GenAI on journalism and short-term issues like whether we're using the latest models. But this video illustrates the immediate crucial issue: do journalists have a basic grasp on the ways LLMs work? x.com/SamCoatesSky...

“Secure Messaging is not just a tool for the Guardian. As part of our commitment to protecting the media and the public interest globally, the Guardian has published the source code for the technology that enables this system” www.theguardian.com/membership/2...

Eeeessh. This really, really isn’t good. If user behaviour is changing so much and search is changing so much, and actually the changes are not really affecting clickthrough… why not let us see all that?

Google IO underlines that the battleground has moved from models as the competitive edge. This second age is about integration and with Workspace, Chrome, Search, Android and more (and the appetite to push Gemini everywhere), Google has a clear advantage www.theverge.com/news/669408/...

As usual @polemicdigital.com is essential reading: “The theory is that extensive usage of LLMs drives increased Google usage with users wanting to verify the generative AI output with actual trusted sources, turning to Google to find those sources.” www.seoforgooglenews.com/p/googles-ai...

I wrote this piece on three serious challenges journalism faces right now and how AI may make them worse if we don't change course It is based on panels and private conversations in Perugia and includes my favourite quote from @chrismoranuk.bsky.social #ijf25 www.linkedin.com/pulse/journa...

And I should add a plug to the panel I organise with @chrismoranuk.bsky.social, @rubinafillion.nytimes.com & Tess Jeffers. Now the hard part: evaluating and integrating AI in newsrooms 14:00 - 14:50, Saturday 12/04/2025 – Teatro del Pavone buff.ly/NCJkUCN

This is a thread of recent articles written for @techpolicypress.bsky.social that, I think, tell something of a story about AI and how we got to where we are.

Only just started to play with NotebookLM's new Mind Maps feature, but for journalists trying to parse large documents or collections of them, it seems an interesting way of seeing the broad landscape and then getting into the detail by clicking a node, as an alternative to asking specific questions

Innovation continues apace in the LLM world (where innovation = ruthlessly Sherlocking everyone else's features). Canvas is Claude's Artifacts feature. For those without access to Claude, it's undoubtedly a useful and versatile tool, especially for product ideation gemini.google/overview/can...

Two things to highlight: the inevitability of this outcome (as predicted in GPT4's System Card) and the shrewd observation that LLMs, for all their benefits, are the perfect tool for endlessly voracious social platforms that prioritise novelty, triviality and outrage www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a...

“Students are not merely passive recipients of AI-generated content; instead, they are engaging actively with AI-based tools to augment their research processes, enhance comprehension, and construct well-informed, analytically-robust academic texts.” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This post is misleading. We were testing specifically to see whether the chatbots accurately identified the sources of excerpts from news articles. We did not intend to extrapolate these findings to the overall accuracy of the chatbots.

This is worth reading if you’re interested in deep research AI tools: “Used uncritically, AI research assistants risk perpetuating a cycle where only easily discoverable sources are read and cited in research products” theimportantwork.substack.com/p/why-ai-ass...

Excellent to see this gap covered. Previously saving your NotebookLM responses lost the elegant citations that make the tool as a whole so useful

🚨 @newscientist.com SCOOP: I've exclusively obtained Peter Kyle's interactions with ChatGPT using FOI laws - in what I believe may be a world-first transparency release. The chatbot said "Lack of Government or Institutional Support" slowed UK AI adoption www.newscientist.com/article/2472...

I’m posting quite a lot less about incremental AI changes these days. But this is where most people’s eyes should be in terms of impact, risk and corporate power struggles. With models becoming less distinct and moats shrinking, it all becomes about integration and scale blog.google/products/sea...

I am delighted to share this new paper on AI collaboration in Chinese news organisations, led by @qingxiaohci.bsky.social‬, which has just been accepted at #CHI25. https://buff.ly/4gCc7hb

New from 404 Media: anyone can push updates to the Doge.gov site. Two sources independently found the issue, one made their own decision to deface the site. "THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN." www.404media.co/anyone-can-p...

This is a really thoughtful, balanced and interesting piece on practical, responsible ways that LLMs might make marking easier while retaining the core human skills that make it a valuable exercise substack.nomoremarking.com/p/the-human-...

Please define 'chutzpah'

My main take from the UK government's AI announcement as a journalist and a British sitcom obsessive is that tech teams always have a wicked sense of humour when naming their products www.gov.uk/government/n...

Good call from Apple edition.cnn.com/2025/01/16/m...

The ‘gift’ that just keeps giving. Here’s what I wrote about this the time before last www.linkedin.com/pulse/alerts...

NEW: Meta has quietly dismantled the system that prevented misinformation from spreading in the United States. Machine-learning classifiers that once identified viral hoaxes and limited their reach have now been switched off, Platformer has learned www.platformer.news/meta-ends-mi...

OpenAI’s economic blueprint: “Automobiles weren’t invented [in America]. But in the UK where some of the earliest cars were introduced, growth was stunted by regulation.” cdn.openai.com/global-affai...

This was not, from the perspective of content creators, a terribly reassuring exchange. thecritic.co.uk/robot-dreams/

Quite right. I don't think this is about making MPs better at computer science; it's about rebuilding public sector technology assessment capacity. Used to be done in national labs and by regulators. With AI, the privatisation of expertise is the biggest challenge.

The always essential RISJ Trends Report for 2025 is out today. "Multiple challenges in 2025 will likely include attacks from hostile politicians, economic headwinds, and battles to protect IP in the face of rapacious AI-driven platforms" reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-m...

"We're gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers." Oh marvellous. www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-...

Morning from the Yorkshire Dales! We have now entered day three snowed in at the Tan Hill Inn, Britain's highest pub

New year, new blog post: I had a random question, what happens when LLMs are prompted to write better code, again and again? Do they actually write better code? The answer is yes*! minimaxir.com/2025/01/writ...

Here's my end-of-year review of things we learned out about LLMs in 2024 - we learned a LOT of things simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/... Table of contents:

It’s three months since I launched London Centric, so here’s what’s happened and a little bit on what’s next. open.substack.com/pub/londonce...

“Like all Netflix movies, Bubble and The Bubble floated away as quickly as they appeared, becoming tiles in the company’s sprawling mosaic of content, destined to be autoplayed on laptops whose owners have fallen asleep.” www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/ess...

“At best, they say, Orion performs better than OpenAI’s current offerings, but hasn’t advanced enough to justify the enormous cost of keeping the new model running.” www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

New AI Snake Oil essay: Last month the AI industry's narrative suddenly flipped — model scaling is dead, but "inference scaling" is taking over. This has left people outside AI confused. What changed? Is AI capability progress slowing? We look at the evidence. 🧵 www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-ai-prog...

There are a LOT of ongoing AI copyright lawsuits in the US right now. We've been keeping track at @wired.com—and, to make things easier on everyone, created this interactive visual guide. It'll be updated w/ any major developments: www.wired.com/story/ai-cop...

The moral of this story is not that genAI has no role to play around news, but that it requires a deep level of thought about what potential risks are. This should have been predictable for anyone with an ounce of knowledge about journalism and this technology www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"We hope our benchmark will spur industry-wide progress on factuality and grounding." deepmind.google/discover/blo...

Great story by @melissahei.bsky.social et al on data use in AI training — with this graphic of particular interest to news publishers (because it shows an estimated proportion of news content vs other content)

A few thoughts on Apple Intelligence, alerts and when summarisation goes wrong... www.linkedin.com/pulse/alerts...

NotebookLM's very lovely new look is now live and there are some really positive improvements. Following soon are the new interactive podcast features which sound like fun blog.google/technology/g...

NEW on our website How 2024 shaped journalism. Dozens of insights from the Reuters Institute's work summarised by @eduardosuarez.bsky.social @matthewleake.bsky.social @marinaadami.bsky.social and Gretel Kahn Click to read reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/how-202...

Went looking for accuracy disclaimer on Time AI and it's fascinating. Not visible on summaries, but deeper within UI. Emphasis on user responsibility, almost like alcohol, then another (not obvious) click required to find first clear admission that it may be inaccurate or out of date.

My latest for @newscientist.bsky.social looks at a really interesting paper lead authored by an actual school student about the use of generative AI by children for schoolwork www.newscientist.com/article/2460...

The "bias meter" sounds like an unproven use case for an unreliable technology offering a crude facade of objective critique that's useless because readers can think by themselves. But the button to plop out a ChatGPT counter-take for every op-ed may be even worse www.latimes.com/california/s...