It’s not lost on me that the only profession mentioned in the Constitution (the press) is a constant target by those who profess their love for the founding document, who loudly say that we can only have a society based on rules set 250 yrs ago.

In our latest piece for CJR, @aisvarya17.bsky.social and I argue that third-party evaluation of AI models is not just a technical matter; it’s a matter of accountability. www.cjr.org/analysis/jou...

In a shock development - AI companies are failing to benchmark what matters in newsrooms. More excellent work from our Tow Center research team @klaudia.bsky.social and @aisvarya17.bsky.social

In our latest piece for CJR, @aisvarya17.bsky.social and I argue that third-party evaluation of AI models is not just a technical matter; it’s a matter of accountability. www.cjr.org/analysis/jou...

The performance tests used by AI companies don’t measure what matters in the newsroom. By @klaudia.bsky.social and @aisvarya17.bsky.social for @towcenter.bsky.social. www.cjr.org/analysis/jou...

stop trying to make civil war happen

I shouldn't be shocked, but I'm still always brought up short to realize how many people think "civility" means "white people speaking in relatively calm voices" no matter what vile shit they say.

Each alleged mass shooter is even more On the Computer All the Time than the previous one. Probably nothing to worry about there

NEW in @columjournreview.bsky.social: Why AI models are bad at fact-checking photos www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

We asked seven different AI models to identify the location, date and source of photos taken by photojournalists, they collectively only answered 14 out of 280 queries completely correctly. @aisvarya17.bsky.social @klaudia.bsky.social @columjournreview.bsky.social www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

New Research: Can AI models be used to fact-check images? www.cjr.org/tow_center/w... I cannot summarize this piece better than @klaudia.bsky.social did in this thread. The methodology and data from the experiment are linked in the article. Reach out with any questions, comments, or feedback!

More testing of LLMs for journalism, this time on identifying image location, date, and source. By @aisvarya17.bsky.social and @klaudia.bsky.social with some of my own commentary. www.cjr.org/tow_center/w... @columjournreview.bsky.social

"@towcenter.bsky.social systematically tested the ability of seven AI chatbots—ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot—on a basic fact-checking task ... We found that all seven models failed to consistently correctly identify the provenance of the photos."

As AI-generated content floods our social media feeds, it's tempting to turn to LLMs to try to figure out whether photos we see are real, or to learn more about when and where they were taken. Unfortunately, these tools can't be relied upon for visual fact-checking tasks. www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

Great work by @aisvarya17.bsky.social and @klaudia.bsky.social. Read more below! www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

The mental health benefits of not knowing any history right now must be massive. Moving through your day with total equanimity. What happens next? Who knows? Maybe something good

Well, AI drinks our water, raises our electric bills, and tells kids to off themselves, but at least it’s making us dumber

As AI-generated content floods our social media feeds, it's tempting to turn to LLMs to try to figure out whether photos we see are real, or to learn more about when and where they were taken. Unfortunately, these tools can't be relied upon for visual fact-checking tasks. www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

NEW in @columjournreview.bsky.social: Why AI models are bad at fact-checking photos www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

Relatedly I think journalism could maybe use stronger professional style norms around not anthropomorphizing the computer systems we report on/reference in our writing.

My all-purpose AI reform is banning computers from pretending they are human. Having names, saying "I," pretending to have feelings, representing what they emit as "advice," etc. That's where much of the mischief starts.

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

never take freedom of the press or access to news for granted. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/...

Google’s AI Overviews putting us closer to a zero-click search reality, and they’re only used in about 20% of searches right now! "It's parasitic, it's unsustainable and it poses a real existential threat to many in our industry." www.npr.org/2025/07/31/n...

Another banger from @klaudia.bsky.social - and by ‘banger’ I mean detailed look at the latest slew of research and reporting into the ways Google Overviews is strangling reporting www.cjr.org/analysis/tra...

"Worldwide search traffic has fallen by 15% in the past year, estimates Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform. The culprit: AI search." www.cjr.org/analysis/tra... Why does this matter? Lighter traffic to news sites means less ad revenue and fewer chances to convert readers into subscribers.

I wrote in @columjournreview.bsky.social about how AI-generated summaries in search results have triggered what news publishers are calling a “traffic apocalypse” www.cjr.org/analysis/tra...

Traffic Apocalypse: Google’s AI Overviews are killing click-throughs to news sites, by Klaudia Jaźwińska of the @towcenter.bsky.social. www.cjr.org/analysis/tra...

there hasn’t been a song of the summer yet because we can’t hear it over the screaming

🚨BREAKING: The last journalists working for AFP in Gaza have said they can no longer work for the news agency. They are out of energy and they are starving to death. I have never seen a statement from a news organisation like it. 🧵

stop 👏 anthropomorphizing 👏 the 👏 chatbot 👏

I’m ride or die for NJ Transit but the app drives me crazy!!!

WaPo: purchased and gutted to pump propaganda by an oligarch. LA Times: purchased and gutted to pump propaganda by an oligarch. CNN: gutted and pushing propaganda MSNBC: being actively gutted and spun off CBS News: being purchased by an oligarch's failson and set up to push propaganda.

I really like how this story is formatted www.nbcnews.com/specials/tru...

The singularity is awesome

ok now do philadelphia

I was deported by the U.S. for reporting on the Columbia University student protests. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

"i asked chatgpt" yeah well i went to the doctor, i went to the mountains, i looked to the children, i drank from the fountains there's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line and the less I seek my source for some definitive closer I am to fine

JENA, La. (AP) — Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil has been released from an immigration jail after 104 days in custody.

this is so so bleak

The em dash supposedly being a “tell” for AI generated text does sort of give away the game on the enormous amount of work stolen from journalists and news organizations that these things were trained on

Miss our recent webinar on #OpenAccess, Attribution & Addressing Faculty #AI Concerns? No problem. Watch the recording on our YouTube channel w/ @klaudia.bsky.social, @aisvarya17.bsky.social & @davehansen.bsky.social at www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgrE... sparcopen.org/our-work/web...

Amazing how hard it is to write: “Police shoot at journalists.”

something I remember when traveling abroad is that when I tell people I live in Philadelphia their mental image is often cream cheese

kind of just endlessly sad and grieving that there are so few voices in the public sphere making the basic principled argument that immigration is an affirmative good in every way and the best way for this country to serve humanity is to welcome people who want or need to leave their homes

the United Airlines gate agent did not allow me to opt out of facial recognition when boarding a flight out of Houston. is that legal??

still reading, but god! finally someone reflecting on this topic! @klaudia.bsky.social is spot-on: newsletters (and newsletterish outlets, like co-ops and worker-owneds relying on self-hosted Ghost instances) are taking off once more. great piece. excited about the future of indie journalism.

Most of us in higher ed in the US are going to lose something over the next four years (opportunities, or funding, or time). But if we believe universities exist, in part, to preserve historical memory and create a space for dissent, our primary job right now is to fight and take the hit.

Thanks to @andrewdeck.bsky.social for writing about the latest @towcenter.bsky.social report in @niemanlab.org! www.niemanlab.org/2025/05/were...