NEWS 🚨 ~ After 4+ years at @restofworld, today I start a new role as a staff writer at @NiemanLab. I’ll be covering the rise of generative AI and its impact on journalism and the media industry. Excited to get started!

I was in London last month for the first in-person JournalismAI Festival hosted by @PolisLSE and @GoogleNewsInit. I wrote up a few of the highlights for @niemanlab. https://t.co/qRtMlJlxZC

NEW: Last week an arbitrator ruled that Politico management violated key AI terms in its union contract. The decision is a landmark win for the Politico union, which is one of the first to legally challenge the rollout of AI technology in its newsroom.

Last week, Suncoast Searchlight's four reporters wrote a letter to their board. Their editor-in-chief had secretly used ChatGPT and inserted hallucinated quotes into their drafts. The next day, one of those reporters was fired. My latest @niemanlab.

Tens of thousands of videos were also taken from popular news creators on YouTube. “When the use is this concentrated it feels less like incidental inclusion and more like large-scale extraction of intellectual property," political talk show host @dpakman told me.

Using a searchable database published by The Atlantic, I identified downloads from specific news channels in video training data sets. These data sets were compiled or used by companies including Microsoft, Meta, Snap, Tencent, Runway, and ByteDance.

Hundreds of thousands of videos were taken from some of the most popular news publishers on YouTube and used to train AI video models. That includes The New York Times, ABC News, Al Jazeera, Vox Media, and The Wall Street Journal. My latest @NiemanLab.

The Wayback Machine’s snapshots of news homepages have dropped off in recent months. Our analysis shows that since May 16, the number of captures available for 100 top news sites declined by 87%. @HanaaTameez and l report for @niemanlab. https://t.co/Laurw9vruH

Deepfakes of broadcast journalists are spreading across social media. Many of them are ads selling cryptocurrencies, gambling apps, and snake oil medicines. Meanwhile, social media companies like Meta profit off the ad dollars. My latest @NiemanLab.

"I’ve had people tell me they're afraid to go on the air, and after 40 years on the air, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that." A new report from @NewsisOut asks how local LGBTQ+ news outlets are weathering the second Trump administration.

Great to chat with @ryanebhowzell at NYU’s Ethics & Journalism Initiative about my reporting! We talked about AI "bias detectors,” automated fact-checking, and navigating both the hype and fear cycles on my beat.

For @thenation: I reviewed @_KarenHao’s Empire of AI and took a closer look at her argument that OpenAI’s "scaling laws" echo the expansionist ideologies of European empires.

A third of jobs related to race, diversity, and equality that were created in U.S. newsrooms since 2020 are gone as of this summer. @HanaaTameez with a months-long investigation and new data on American journalism's turn away from DEI initiatives. https://t.co/ETG6FMV7Nh

In France, reporters are getting a cut of AI licensing revenue. Le Monde, for example, will redistribute 25% of its deals with OpenAI and Perplexity. I dug into these union agreements and asked why they haven’t made it across the Atlantic.

A new report from @CISLMUNC asks what it takes for small local newsrooms to build an AI chatbot. Researchers helped four newsrooms launch experimental chatbots in under a month. But only one has committed to running their chatbot beyond the program.

Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper by circulation, has sued Perplexity for copyright infringement. The filing claims that Perplexity accessed 119,467 articles on Yomiuri’s site between February and June of this year. @NiemanLab

In a July arbitration hearing, Politico's top editors testified that two recent AI experiments don't need to meet journalistic editorial standards. Union members alleged those experiments violated AI guidelines in their contract. My latest @niemanlab

A new study by Muck Rack recorded over 1 million citations output by major generative AI models. Journalistic content was cited in 27% of responses, a number that jumped to 49% when those responses required "a level of recency."

Here's our original story on Good Daily: https://t.co/AjBy6Jl2Ue And a database I compiled earlier this year, which lists 337 of its local newsletters:

In January, I uncovered a network of AI-generated newsletters, called Good Daily, that was targeting hundreds of small towns across the U.S. This week, the newsletter company 6AM City announced it had bought Good Daily and brought its founder on board.

Today, Dow Jones launched a French version of its newswire using custom-built machine translation. It's part of a larger push to bring "real-time," AI-powered translations to the newswire, including services in Korean and Japanese. My latest @niemanlab.