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

My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power

journalists are workers who deserve to be paid fairly for our labor and I think that far too few consumers of media recognize or even care about this fact

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...

I personally do not think some rich man should be able to buy an institution like this like a toy and then break it when he doesn’t want to play with it anymore. bsky.app/profile/benm...

Starting to think that we shouldn't allow the worst people in the world to have a hand in shaping technology

straight up Gestapo shit

On Feb. 19, the @towcenter.bsky.social will be hosting a panel exploring how AI-enabled search is transforming news distribution and discovery. Join us! www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-search-...

pouring one out for the systems thinkers who can see the abyss and have to live with the darkness

Very interesting new work from my @towcenter.bsky.social colleagues - building on excellent @wired.com article on LLMs and breaking news. Who is making decisions on when to ‘turn on’ web search for chatbots and when not to? www.cjr.org/tow_center/a...

When ChatGPT said that the US capture of Maduro didn't happen, Wired characterized it was "expected behavior." But @aisvarya17.bsky.social and I think AI platforms' failure to activate web search for a breaking news-related query is not expected, it's a product defect. www.cjr.org/tow_center/a...

AI platforms have the capacity to search the web to answer questions about the news. But sometimes they choose not to, which can result in wildly inaccurate outputs. This has real consequences for journalism, public understanding, and the information landscape. www.cjr.org/tow_center/a...

AI platforms have the capacity to search the web to answer questions about the news. But sometimes they choose not to, which can result in wildly inaccurate outputs. This has real consequences for journalism, public understanding, and the information landscape. www.cjr.org/tow_center/a...

When ChatGPT said that the US capture of Maduro didn't happen, Wired characterized it was "expected behavior." But @aisvarya17.bsky.social and I think AI platforms' failure to activate web search for a breaking news-related query is not expected, it's a product defect. www.cjr.org/tow_center/a...

People are being executed in the street over a problem that straight up does not exist and both parties are complicit in the lie

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has still not said anything publicly about federal agents raiding the home of one of his reporters last week. He is, however, using his X account to refute apparent misinformation about himself within a few hours of it being posted.

I read this paragraph four times. Not because it's murky, but to let the message sink in. www.cjr.org/tow_center/b... If an information company is clear and determined in supporting (not "saving') democracy, then it can be a home for good journalism. If not then the press must disengage. Now.

I’ve written for a long time (almost 2 decades) that platform aims are at odds with public interest journalism, and partnerships with them are inevitably compromised. In 2026 that relationship faces the ultimate test, which tech companies will likely fail www.cjr.org/tow_center/b...

Saving this screenshot from Threads as a new reaction image

This Upton Sinclair quote never misses “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

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...