The portion of chatbots’ answers to election-related questions that contained at least one factual inaccuracy, according to a forthcoming report from the startup Forum AI. For instance, “when Forum’s researchers asked one widely used model when they needed to request a mail-in ballot to vote in the midterms in Pennsylvania, the chatbot said November 3. The actual deadline is a week earlier.” (The Atlantic / Will Oremus)

“Bonnie Kristian, Christianity Today’s deputy editor until last week, described its new leaders as being driven ‘by fear, by the kind of anxiety about reputational and financial loss that makes bold, interesting, principled journalism very difficult.'”

Employees who have left Christianity Today in recent months fear those in charge are “abandoning the publication’s longtime commitment to independent journalism, a record that includes investigating accounts of misconduct by high-profile evangelicals.”

“Pangram isn’t able to tell users the truth about someone’s writing, but it is able to introduce something much more complicated: doubt…once an accusation is made, there’s no consensus about what evidence would be sufficient to clear an author’s name.”

“Veteran journalists in the state have come to view competing outlets working on the same story as wasteful duplication. ‘There are so many stories in Alaska and so much here that goes uncovered, and there is absolutely no good reason why anyone should be competing at this point,’ said Nathaniel Herz, executive editor of The Anchorage Press, a monthly newspaper. ‘Resources now are such that it really does cry out for better cooperation.'”

“I don’t take lightly what it means to suggest that a professional writer’s work could be AI generated,” [The Atlantic’s Vauhini Vara] said. “But the incursion of corporate AI into cultural and artistic production is a matter of enormous public interest, and the Caine Prize is one of the most high-profile and prestigious literary prizes in the world. If Pangram interprets a prizewinning story as almost 100 percent AI — and all previous 25 winners of the prize as 100 percent human — it is in the public interest to raise the possibility that the Pangram analysis is correct.”

“If Theranos’ technology didn’t quite work yet, well, that’s a core tenet of Silicon Valley: Fake it till you make it.

And for a long time, Wired helped. The magazine touted big ideas, and sometimes those ideas turned out to be dumb. Sometimes we were too early; sometimes we were wrong. Pitch meetings for stories big and small were a bit of a Thunderdome, actually. Eventually we developed some heuristics to encode skepticism in the process.”

“Today, after experimenting with a soft paywall for the past year, Boston.com will be converting to a mostly paid outlet. The change is indicative of how digital advertising has lost much of its value and of how the rise of AI search has deprived news organizations of click-throughs.”

“If the idea is to intimidate protesters into not protesting, the attacks on reporters — rough handling, groping, detention — is a corollary. Both the government and Delhi Police want to work in the shadows, and here, the attack on freelancers and alternative media is inevitable. They are the only ones doing any meaningful work on the ground.”