Next week: AI Real Talk with Pangram CEO; plus new AI x Investigative Forum @ The New York Times

AI x Investigative Journalism Forum at The New York Times, Sept. 25

Registration is open for a full day on how AI is changing investigative journalism, from document analysis to pattern detection to verification. Expect case studies and hands-on skill-building with investigative reporters, data journalists, editors and engineers, plus sessions from The Times' own AI newsroom team on how they're building and using tools. If you're interested in presenting or sponsoring, reply to this email.

AI Real Talk: Spotting AI slop with Pangram's CEO

Join us Thursday, July 9 online for the latest installment of our AI Real Talk series. Pangram's work was among the first to publicly show the novel "Shy Girl" was largely AI-written. The company is now tracking machine-generated text on news sites that's reaching nearly 10 percent of all articles. CEO Max Spero, the self-described "slop janitor," will walk us through how detection works and why it matters, and we'll have plenty of time for questions.

Register for our LA visual journalism forum

Registration is open for our AI x Visual Journalism Forum in Los Angeles, Aug. 25-26, produced with Arizona State University's Narrative and Emerging Media program. It brings together visual journalists, technologists, artists and ethics experts for hands-on sessions on how AI is reshaping visual storytelling. If you're interested in presenting or sponsoring, reply to this email.

Proof beats prose

Our latest AI Papers Explained post breaks down a study where researchers gave AI the same data that newsrooms used for stories and asked the LLM to write its own versions. Blind readers preferred the machine's versions over the human originals by about three to one, and the widest gap was transparency: whether the story showed where the numbers came from. Read past the "AI beat humans" headline and the real lesson is about the sourcing.

Worth a read

• OpenAI, Microsoft sued by smaller publishers for scraping articles (Bloomberg Law). Nearly 400 newspapers are behind the suit.
• The AI world is getting 'loopy' (TechCrunch). Swarms of agents authorized to run continuously in the background.
• Time and Axios turn AI prominence into advertising revenue (Press Gazette). Both are building a business off the invisible version of their sites that only AI bots read.
• For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward (Techstrong.ai).
• Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to tell welcome from unwelcome visitors (The Register).
• Solving an ARD problem in AI: Agentic Resource Discovery (InfoWorld). A proposed standard for how agents find the tools they need.
• The Agentic AI Investigative Journalism Challenge (Northwestern). An open competition for investigative teams putting coding agents on document dumps.

Upcoming events

• July 9, online: Hacks/Hackers AI Real Talk with Pangram's Max Spero
• Aug 25-26, Los Angeles: AI x Visual Journalism Forum with Arizona State University (Hacks/Hackers)
• Sept 17-18, Austin: International Symposium on Journalism (ISOJ) 2026
• Sept 21, Madrid: INMA Media Innovation Week
• Sept 25, New York: AI x Investigative Journalism Forum at The New York Times (Hacks/Hackers)
• Oct 1, Bonn: b° future festival
• Nov 17-19, London + online: JournalismAI Festival

Jobs

• AI Research Lead, The Associated Press (New York, NY)
• Member of Editorial Staff, Anthropic (San Francisco / New York)
• Research Communications Manager, Safety, OpenAI (San Francisco)
• Head of Global Policy, Scale AI (San Francisco / Washington, DC)
• Health Tech Editor, Modern Healthcare (US)
• Media Manager, Earth Journalism Network / Internews (remote)
• AI Adoption, Content and Community Manager, OpenAI for Government (Washington, DC)