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Why “Sorry, I don’t know” is sometimes the best answer: The Washington Post’s technology chief on its first AI chatbot
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Articles by Joshua Benton

Joshua Benton founded Nieman Lab in 2008 and served as its director until 2020; he is now the Lab’s senior writer. Before spending a year at Harvard as a 2008 Nieman Fellow, he spent a decade in newspapers, mostly at The Dallas Morning News. His reports on cheating on standardized tests in the Texas public schools led to the permanent shutdown of a school district and won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has reported from a dozen foreign countries, been a Pew Fellow in International Journalism, and three times been a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. Before Dallas, he was a reporter and occasional rock critic for The Toledo Blade. He wrote his first HTML in January 1994.
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They’re not a majority, based on a new look at education data, but they are wildly overrepresented.
“Never get comfortable; always assume that the world is conspiring to take down the industry and that we will have to move heaven and earth to overcome those forces to blaze a path forward for quality journalism.”
“Frankly, the nation’s media may well be talking and thinking too much about the need for someone to ‘save journalism’ when all of us should be laser-focused on doing the work that may well save democracy.”
The flaws in the site’s strategy were highly predictable (and repeatedly predicted). But Jimmy Finkelstein’s muddled nostalgia has still left hundreds of people out of a job.
“The story is less at [the U.S. Department of Justice] than with sheriffs and prosecutors at the local level, mostly the county level.” But how do you tell that story when local news is in decline?
The tech giant wants to let some app developers make money on the web — but take 27% of the revenue they generate along the way. But publishers should still have access to a better deal.
Its new owner, Sinclair executive chairman David D. Smith, has pushed local TV news hard to the right. Will he do the same with newspapers — a medium he’s called “so left wing as to be meaningless dribble…so devoid of reality and serving no real purpose”?
A new study asked thousands to evaluate the accuracy of news articles — both real and fake — by doing some research online. But for many, heading to Google led them farther from the truth, not closer.
That an AI model was trained on copyrighted material does not make all of the model’s outputs a copyright violation.