Cloudflare is introducing new controls that let website owners manage AI related traffic by purpose rather than treating every automated visitor the same. Jin-Hee Lee and Bryan Becker announce the changes in an official Cloudflare Blog post, describing separate settings for Search, Agent and Training crawlers. The distinction matters for publishers and other content businesses. …
Restaurants are increasingly using handwritten menus, custom embroidery and lo-fi photography to signal craft at a time when AI-generated marketing images are flooding social media. Bettina Makalintal writes for Eater that restaurants are embracing visible handmade details as a response to AI-generated visual content. The shift reflects a wider cultural reaction to synthetic images that …
Google’s expansion of AI-powered search is raising fresh concerns that the company could weaken the open web by keeping users inside its own products. Kate Conger reports for The New York Times that publishers, retailers and other website operators are seeing search traffic fall as Google provides more answers directly through AI. Google’s AI Mode …
Access to AI advice can make people less accurate while dramatically increasing their confidence, according to a study by researchers from universities in France and Italy. Participants were far less likely to acknowledge uncertainty after receiving AI input, even when the model gave unreliable answers. Ana Maria Constantin reports for The Next Web that the …
AI-generated books are rapidly expanding Amazon’s catalogue, often with little disclosure to customers and limited evidence of human authorship. Kashmir Hill reports in The New York Times that an AI generated biography of her appeared on Amazon without her knowledge or participation. The 90 page book, titled “The Biography of Kashmir Hill,” mixed public facts …
Max Spero, CEO of Pangram, writes in a company blog post that his firm’s AI detection tool has scanned over one million social media posts since April 2026, revealing how deeply generative AI has penetrated online writing. Users of Pangram’s Chrome extension can opt in to share anonymous scan data, and the resulting dataset covers …
Journalists working with AI tools risk losing certain foundational skills while developing new ones, according to a new study published in Journalism Practice. Andrew Deck reports for Nieman Journalism Lab that researcher Shangyuan Wu of the National University of Singapore interviewed 14 working journalists in Singapore to explore this shift. The study builds on last …
Emily M. Bender, professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington, is pushing back against widespread misreadings of her 2021 paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.” Gwendolyn Rak reports for IEEE Spectrum that Bender used the paper’s five-year anniversary to clarify what the term actually describes. Not all of AI, and not an …
A story titled “The Ghost Paper That Ate Alabama” spread quickly on social media, claiming a right-wing media company had bought and shut down 47 weekly newspapers, replacing journalists with AI-generated content. Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Journalism Lab that the story, published by a site called The Editorial, was entirely invented. Benton found that …
A German court has ruled that Google is legally responsible for the content of its AI-generated search summaries. Bruce Schneier writes for Schneier on Security that the court rejected Google’s argument that users should verify AI output themselves, ruling instead that the summaries are “an expression of Google’s business activities.” The decision reignites a long-running …