My response to anything over the next two weeks

I don't know how many times this needs to be said, but apparently a lot: If you are not in a position to verify the accuracy of some synthetic text, the synthetic text is not useful/has a high potential to be misleading. This is one of those cases.

Today's addition is a partnership between OpenAI and TIME centered around fostering AI literacy tow.cjr.org/ai-deals-law...

This entire weekend

Today's additions: - a commercial partnership that allows Google to test new experimental features - new licensing partners for Gemini - a deal between ProRata and the Danish Press Publications’ Collective Management Organization

I say this as someone whose entire job is finding the narrow use cases in which AI is actually useful: All the fear about AI, all the reluctance to adopt it, is entirely legitimate, and a product of the fact that it's been foisted on the public with no consideration of its negative externalities.

Today's addition was a new licensing partnership between Condé Nast and Microsoft, announced late last week

We've already added two more lawsuits and a big new deal by Meta

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism is releasing a tracker, created by Tow Researchers @klaudia.bsky.social and @aisvarya17.bsky.social, that monitors lawsuits, deals, and grants between news publishers and AI companies www.cjr.org/analysis/law... tow.cjr.org/ai-deals-law...

Announcing a new tool to keep track of disputes and deals between news publishers and AI companies. Read @klaudia.bsky.social. www.cjr.org/analysis/law...

Today the @towcenter.bsky.social is releasing a tracker (built by my talented colleague @aisvarya17.bsky.social) that monitors developments between news publishers and AI companies—including lawsuits, deals, and grants—based on publicly available information. tow.cjr.org/ai-deals-law...

Research Tools: New Tracker From Tow Center for Digital #Journalism "Monitors Developments Between News #Publishers and #AI Companies" www.infodocket.com/2025/12/04/r... #lawsuits #deals #grants @towcenter.bsky.social

Last week, two more lawsuits were filed by news publishers against OpenAI and Microsoft, adding to a long string of copyright cases against AI companies. I wrote about it for @columjournreview.bsky.social (via @towcenter.bsky.social) www.cjr.org/analysis/law...

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

So if AI succeeds loads of people lose their jobs as they're replaced by AI, and if AI fails, loads of people lose their jobs as the economy crashes?

Thomson Reuters, has a Foundation, focuses on press freedom, funds research, runs a ‘Trust’ conference …and also uses a data brokerage business that helps ICE boost its surveillance capabilities

Like it or not this technology is here to stay and if you don’t use it you’ll fall behind in your industry

every company in 2025

Watching Mamdani's victory speech, I'm struck by his—and his campaign's—unabashed vision of the US as an immigrant society, a culture built from the ground up from diversity. It is a complete rejection and reversal of the search for a white-washed homogeneity that the political right projects.

@technologyreview.com blocks all of OpenAI's and Perplexity's disclosed web crawlers in their robots.txt. Despite this, both OpenAI’s Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet retrieved the full text of a subscriber-exclusive article when asked to. How? Read @klaudia.bsky.social and my recent CJR article:

AI browsers like OpenAI's Atlas and Perplexity's Comet have ways of getting around paywalls and crawler restrictions to access publisher content. And sometimes, if they can't access an article, they'll just recreate it using 'digital breadcrumbs'

How AI Browsers Sneak Past Blockers and Paywalls, by Aisvarya Chandrasekar and Klaudia Jaźwińska of the @towcenter.bsky.social. www.cjr.org/analysis/how...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Whenever people complain about the number of folks relying on food stamps, it is worth reminding them that SNAP is, by too large of a degree, a subsidy for corporations that refuse to pay a living wage and their political allies who reject public policy prescriptions to reduce income inequality.

We're going to have a big beautiful dark age, perhaps darker than ever before. And I think you'll be very happy

The fact that I can’t immediately tell if a video is AI now actually makes me sick to my stomach. I cannot believe there are people who think this is a good thing

twice a year the entire U.S. press becomes a marketing extension of a single billionaire-owned retailer, and nobody in any position of editorial power thinks it's weird or gross

Today for @columjournreview.bsky.social I wrote about how Reddit's role as a vital supplier of data for AI companies has made it a consequential player in the relationship between platforms and publishers www.cjr.org/analysis/red... (cc: @towcenter.bsky.social)

Since Reddit struck licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, its traffic—and its importance to legacy media outlets—has surged, by @klaudia.bsky.social of the @towcenter.bsky.social. www.cjr.org/analysis/red...

damn there's a fake, likely AI-generated quote attributed to me in an article about AI. I've never used the phrase "Faustian bargain" in my life

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...