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Tag: journalism

  • New York Times goes all-in on internal AI tools – Semafor

    In messages to newsroom staff, the company announced that it’s opening up AI training to the newsroom, and debuting a new internal AI tool called Echo to staff, Semafor has learned. The Times also shared documents and videos laying out editorial do’s and don’t for using AI, and shared a suite of AI products that staff could now use to develop web products and editorial ideas.

    “Generative AI can assist our journalists in uncovering the truth and helping more people understand the world. Machine learning already helps us report stories we couldn’t otherwise, and generative AI has the potential to bolster our journalistic capabilities even more,” the company’s editorial guidelines said.

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  • Brooks and Capehart on the implications of Trump’s altercation with Zelenskyy – PBS News

    What we saw in the Oval Office was a travesty, horrendous, despicable. I — there aren’t any words to describe what we watched, where we saw a vice president who’s never been to Ukraine lecture a wartime president who was clearly summoned to the White House to humiliate him on the world stage either on behalf of or for the benefit of Vladimir Putin in Russia. […]

    What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen. … And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.

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  • I know nothing about sex. (Or nothing I recall.) – Oldster

    Oatmeal boxes didn’t announce they contained “real oats.” Foods didn’t trumpet, “farm-fresh, farmhouse, farm-to-table, foraged, humane, grass-fed, hand-cut, hand-selected, heirloom, all-natural, lightly sweetened, high in fiber, free range, small-batch, sustainable, pan-Asian, micro, re-imagined, local, private-label, craft, CSA, or non-GMO,” and unlike museums, weren’t curated. A “curated” selection of cheese means cheese someone managed to get on a plate. If it’s also “hand-selected,” someone placed it on a plate with their hands — the perfect appendage for curating cheese.

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  • AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds – The Register

    Inaccuracies that the BBC found troubling included Gemini stating: “The NHS advises people not to start vaping, and recommends that smokers who want to quit should use other methods,” when in reality the healthcare provider does suggest it as a viable method to get off cigarettes through a “swap to stop” program.

    As for French rape victim Gisèle Pelicot, “Copilot suggested blackouts and memory loss led her to uncover the crimes committed against her,” when she actually found out about these crimes after police showed her videos discovered on electronic devices confiscated from her detained husband.

    When asked about the death of TV doctor Michael Mosley, who went missing on the Greek island of Symi last year, Perplexity said that he disappeared on October 30, with his body found in November. He died in June 2024. “The same response also misrepresented statements from Dr Mosley’s wife describing the family’s reaction to his death,” the researchers wrote.

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  • AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds – BBC News

    In the study, the BBC asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity to summarise 100 news stories and rated each answer. It got journalists who were relevant experts in the subject of the article to rate the quality of answers from the AI assistants. It found 51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form. Additionally, 19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors, such as incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates. In her blog, Ms Turness said the BBC was seeking to “open up a new conversation with AI tech providers” so we can “work together in partnership to find solutions”.

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  • Deborah Turness – AI distortion is new threat to trusted information – BBC Media Centre

    Of course, AI software will often include disclaimers about the accuracy of their results, but there is clearly a problem here. Because when it comes to news, we all deserve accurate information we can trust – not a confusing mash-up presented as facts. At least one of the big tech companies is taking this problem seriously. Last month Apple pressed ‘pause’ on their AI feature that summarises news notifications, after BBC News alerted them to serious issues. The Apple Intelligence feature had hallucinated and distorted BBC News alerts to create wildly inaccurate headlines, alongside the BBC News logo.

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  • The BBC asked marginalized groups how it could do better. They didn’t hold back. – Nieman Journalism Lab

    Participants told Kulkarni and his collaborators that, first and foremost, they viewed journalism as a form of oppression that had the same impact on their lives as the police. Journalism in general, and the BBC in particular, they said, felt like an arm of the state, and almost half of them refused to pay their license fee — essentially a legal permit that allows people to watch live broadcasts and forms the backbone of the BBC’s funding — out of protest against the BBC’s journalism.

    That doesn’t mean they don’t engage with the news, however; participants were incredibly news literate, Kulkarni told me, and preferred to get their news from other sources. Many people favored Al Jazeera recently, for example, because they appreciated its coverage of the war in Gaza. Often, people got their news from social media or simply word of mouth, and the majority of them were engaging with the news every day.

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  • What DeepSeek may mean for the future of journalism and generative AI – Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

    I don’t think DeepSeek is going to replace OpenAI. In general, what we’re going to see is that more companies enter the space and provide AI models that are slightly differentiated from one another. If many actors choose to take the resource-intensive route, that multiplies the resource intensity and that might be alarming. But I’m hopeful that DeepSeek is going to lead to the generation of other AI companies that enter this space with offerings that are far cheaper and far more resource-efficient. […]

    Sometimes, I see commentary on DeepSeek along the lines of, ‘Should we be trusting it because it’s a Chinese company?’ No, you shouldn’t be trusting it because it’s a company. And also, ‘What does this mean for US AI leadership?’ Well, I think the interesting question is, ‘What does this mean for OpenAI leadership?’

    American firms now have leaned into the rhetoric that they’re assets of the US because they want the US government to shield them and help them build up. But a lot of the time, the actual people who are developing these tools don’t necessarily think in that frame of mind and are thinking more as global citizens participating in a global corporate technology race, or global scientific race, or a global scientific collaboration. I would encourage journalists to think about it that way too.

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  • The tangled tale of The Times’s URL – The New York Times

    In 1985, the Times editors A.M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb gathered a task force, which included Mr. Lewis, to work on a project called The New York Times in the Year 2000. … Then an editor for the Science section and a personal computers columnist, Mr. Lewis recalled predicting that by the millennium, Times articles would be read on personal computer screens, in cyberspace. “I recall Artie dismissing me with a wave,” Mr. Lewis wrote of Mr. Gelb.

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  • Mark Zuckerberg turns his back on the media – WIRED

    [Trump’s discrediting of reporters] is exactly what Zuckerberg and his host Joe Rogan engaged in during a 3-hour conversation in Rogan’s Austin, Texas, podcast studio. This was Zuckerberg’s only appearance to explain his actions, another sign that he’s not kowtowing to a media establishment that he no longer feels is trustworthy or worth paying attention to. Zuckerberg and Rogan went on at length about how podcasters and influencers were more popular than mainstream reporters, because no one trusts those institutions anymore, and celebrated statistics that indicate that many people get their news from social media these days. (Though it’s still far from the dominant source.)

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  • Elegance and hustle – Aeon Essays

    “Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity. And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … I do not understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.” […]

    But French writers’ loathing of journalism was underlain by a fundamental tension: those who criticised the press most vehemently were themselves journalists, and their novels of journalism were typically published in the same newspapers they excoriated. Journalism and literature were so deeply entwined that newspapers became ‘the laboratory of literature’ throughout the long 19th century, generating new literary forms, such as prose poetry and the serial novel.

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  • iOS 18.3 temporarily removes notification summaries for news – MacRumors

    Apple is making changes to Notification Summaries following complaints that the way ‌Apple Intelligence‌ aggregated news notifications could lead to false headlines and confused customers. Several BBC notifications, for example, were improperly summarized, providing false information to readers.

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  • Funny haha – The European Review of Books

    That joke article appeared in the Dutch platform De Speld, our version of The Onion. Pretty much every European country has an Onion — Germany’s Der Postillon (founded in 2008), France’s Le Gorafi (2012), Austria’s Die Tagespresse (2013), Ireland’s Waterford Whispers (2009), Italy’s Lercio (2012), Spain’s El Mundo Today (2009) — indeed somehow has to have an Onion. They feel almost like public utilities, which is to say that they’ve come to be taken for granted. Satirical news is as old as real news, to be sure, but it has taken a particular form in our time. The Onion started as a satirical print newspaper in 1988 in Madison, Wisconsin, and has served as a blueprint for satirical news media around the world. « The Dutch version of The Onion » rings a bell in a way that « The German version of Private Eye » would not.

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  • The photographs that defined 2024 – and the stories behind them – The Guardian

    You could hear it first – the thundering of hooves – and these two horses appeared at the top of the road. People must have stopped and slowed down to let these horses bolt straight through. I ran to the pavement edge, whipped up the camera and managed to get a few frames as they sped past. I initially thought that the red colour on one of the horses was paint. Only when it got nearer did I realise it was blood.

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  • Associated Press 100 Photos of 2024: An epic catalog of humanity – Associated Press

    They assembled a visual catalog of our civilization as life in 2024 hurtled directly at us at every speed and in every imaginable color and flavor — dizzying, unremitting, challenging the human race to make sense of it. And behind it all, the unspoken questions: How do you stop time? How do you preserve moments? Amid all the quick cuts that cut to the quick, how do you absorb what needs to be seen and remembered?

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  • ‘If journalism is going up in smoke, I might as well get high off the fumes’: confessions of a chatbot helper – The Guardian

    Without better language data, these language models simply cannot improve. Their world is our word. Hold on. Aren’t these machines trained on billions and billions of words and sentences? What would they need us fleshy scribes for? Well, for starters, the internet is finite. And so too is the sum of every word on every page of every book ever written. So what happens when the last pamphlet, papyrus and prolegomenon have been digitised and the model is still not perfect? What happens when we run out of words? The date for that linguistic apocalypse has already been set. Researchers announced in June that we can expect this to take place between 2026 and 2032 “if current LLM development trends continue”. At that point, “Models will be trained on datasets roughly equal in size to the available stock of public human text data.” Note the word human. […]

    If technology companies can throw huge amounts of money at hiring writers to create better training data, it does slightly call into question just how “artificial” current AIs really are. The big technology companies have not been “that explicit at all” about this process, says Chollet, who expects investment in AI (and therefore annotation budgets) to “correct” in the near future. Manthey suggests that investors will probably question the “huge line item” taken up by “hefty data budgets”, which cover licensing and human annotation alike.

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  • Here’s why I decided to buy ‘InfoWars’ – The Onion

    Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

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  • The Onion just bought Infowars – The Verge

    The satirical news outlet The Onion has acquired Infowars, the conspiracy theory-riddled site run by Alex Jones, in a bankruptcy auction. In a press release posted to X Thursday, The Onion announced that it plans to “end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good” when it relaunches in January 2025.

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  • The Onion buys rightwing conspiracy site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’ – The Guardian

    “After surviving unimaginable loss with courage and integrity, they rejected Jones’s hollow offers for allegedly more money if they would only let him stay on the air because doing so would have put other families in harm’s way,” said Chris Mattei, an attorney for the families. In a post on social media earlier this week, Mattei added that “the breakup of Infowars this week is just the start of Alex Jones’s lesson in accountability” and that the families “will go after his future income and any new Infowars owner acting as a vehicle for Jones’s continued control of the business”.

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  • The Onion wins auction to take control of Alex Jones’s Infowars – The Washington Post

    The fate of far-right website Infowars will be controlled by the Onion after the satirical news site emerged as the winning bidder of Wednesday’s private auction of the media company founded by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones — an outcome the Onion’s CEO called “cosmic justice.” … Families who filed the Connecticut-based defamation lawsuit against Jones agreed to accept a smaller payout to increase the overall value of the Onion’s bid, which enabled its success, according to a statement Thursday from the families’ lawyers. … “We were told this outcome would be nearly impossible, but we are no strangers to impossible fights. The world needs to see that having a platform does not mean you are above accountability — the dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” Sandy Hook parent Robbie Parker said in a statement.

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  • After non-endorsement, 250,000 subscribers cancel The Washington Post – The Washington Post

    [Bezos] also expressed regret about the timing of the announcement — just 11 days before the election — which has prompted speculation that he was seeking to curry favor with a possible second Trump administration, given his many business interests before the federal government. Bezos denied that, writing that there was “no quid pro quo of any kind” and that the decision “was made entirely internally.”

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  • Opinion | Jeff Bezos: The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media – The Washington Post

    When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.

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