Andrew Deck

1 month ago | niemanlab.org | Andrew Deck

Last month, Patch announced it was publishing AI-generated newsletters in 30,000 communities across the U.S. These newsletters scrape from local news sites, social media groups, and official town websites, then use large language models (LLMs) to select the most relevant headlines and draft story summaries. The final product is a daily or twice-weekly email round up, with link outs to five articles and a list of upcoming events.

2 months ago | niemanlab.org | Andrew Deck

On March 7, education reporter Hannah Dellinger published a story on the experiences of Michigan LGBTQ+ students since Donald Trump took office. Dellinger spoke to several students who have seen a rise in hate speech at school after the president signed a series of anti-trans executive orders. The lead voice in the story was Sebastian Eaton-Ellison, a gender-fluid senior who has faced relentless bullying, and even physical assaults, at his high school.

2 months ago | niemanlab.org | Andrew Deck

LINK: www.cjr.org  ➚   |   Posted by: Andrew Deck   |   March 10, 2025Over the past year, AI chatbots have been widely criticized for how poorly they cite news publishers, and how little traffic they drive to the publishers they do cite properly. ChatGPT has often been at the center of this conversation. Last summer, I reported that ChatGPT frequently hallucinated fake URLs to news sites, even to articles from OpenAI’s own publishing partners.

2 months ago | niemanlab.org | Andrew Deck

In December, Carla McCanna received a message from a recruiter at the AI training data company Outlier. McCanna, a recent graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, had never heard of the company, but the message came through Handshake, a recruiting portal hosted by the university. “The recruiter said my skills align with a writing expert role and that I’d be training AI models to optimize accuracy and efficiency,” McCanna told me.

Feb 10, 2025 | niemanlab.org | Andrew Deck

LINK: docs.google.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Andrew Deck   |   February 10, 2025On January 27, I published a story on Good Daily, a network of AI-generated local newsletters that over the past year has quietly spread to 355 towns and cities across the U.S.Since our story ran, I’ve received requests to share a list of all the newsletters we’ve identified.