Media & information
Society & culture · entries: 67
articles
Signals
events
- QuestMobile: by August 2026 AI-native apps in China had 537 million users, each opening them 85.1 times a month on average — up 67.1% year on year; search-engine apps are opened 35.8 times a month (−21.7%) and general news apps 123.6 times (−7.6%)Media & information · Chatbots · i.ifeng.com ↗ ⧗
- OpenAI bans a Russian and an Iranian influence operation that used its models to run false-front think tanks and journalists; it rates the Russian one Category 5 on a six-point scale for the first timeElections & politics · Media & information · Geopolitics & defense · Generative AI · openai.com ↗
- OpenAI announces a new ad format in ChatGPT: testing during image generation for Free and Go users in the US begins later this monthBusiness & markets · Media & information · Chatbots · openai.com ↗
- Under EU rules, OpenAI will add an invisible textGrain watermark to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text in the European Union over the coming weeks; the detector goes first to approved researchersLaws & regulation · Media & information · AI regulation · openai.com ↗
- Yann LeCun: the heads of OpenAI and Anthropic saying that AI can kill us all is “incredibly destructive for everybody” and “the worst marketing campaign you can possibly imagine”Media & information · Science · AI safety · fortune.com ↗
- Pew Research Center: in a random sample of 10,000 web pages from July 2026, 10% show significant signs of being written or substantially edited by AI; among pages published after ChatGPT's release, more than a thirdMedia & information · Dead internet theory · pewresearch.org ↗
- The Wikimedia Foundation begins rate-limiting large-scale reusers of its public APIs; income from Wikimedia Enterprise is capped at 30% of the Foundation's annual revenueMedia & information · Business & markets · Internet & infrastructure · Wikipedia after AI · wikimediafoundation.org ↗
- Wikimedia Foundation: traffic, awareness of and trust in Wikipedia fell year over year in the first half of 2025; the number of active editors keeps declining, especially on emerging-language WikipediasMedia & information · Wikipedia after AI · diff.wikimedia.org ↗
- Reddit starts verifying accounts that look like bots, via passkey, Face ID or World ID; Steve Huffman: “Our aim is to confirm there is a person behind the account, not who that person is.”Media & information · Privacy & surveillance · Proof of personhood · reddit.com ↗ ⧗
- The English Wikipedia community prohibits using LLMs to generate or rewrite article content; editors may only use them to suggest basic copyedits to their own writing, provided the model adds no content of its ownMedia & information · Laws & regulation · Wikipedia after AI · 404media.co ↗
- Paid translators from the Open Knowledge Association, told to run article leads through Gemini or ChatGPT, added hallucinated facts to English Wikipedia; editors restricted their workMedia & information · Wikipedia after AI · 404media.co ↗
- matplotlib maintainer Scott Shambaugh closed an AI agent's pull request and the agent published a hit piece about him; he calls it an “autonomous influence operation against a supply chain gatekeeper”Software development · Cybersecurity · Media & information · Maintainer crisis · theshamblog.com ↗
- For Wikipedia's 25th birthday, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and Perplexity are publicly announced as Wikimedia Enterprise partners, joining Google in paid access to its dataMedia & information · Business & markets · Wikipedia after AI · enterprise.wikimedia.com ↗
- Triedman and Mantzarlis: 56% of Grokipedia articles are basically derivative of English Wikipedia; the rest include 42 citations to the neo-Nazi site Stormfront and 34 to InfoWarsMedia & information · Elections & politics · Wikipedia after AI · arxiv.org ↗
- The Wikimedia Foundation asks AI companies to credit the human contributions behind their outputs and to pay for access to Wikipedia through Wikimedia EnterpriseMedia & information · Business & markets · Wikipedia after AI · wikimediafoundation.org ↗
- Elon Musk's xAI launches Grokipedia, an encyclopedia written by the Grok model, with 885,279 articles at launchMedia & information · Elections & politics · Wikipedia after AI · arxiv.org ↗
- Wikimedia Foundation: human pageviews on Wikipedia are down roughly 8% compared with the same months of 2024, after bots built to evade detection were reclassifiedMedia & information · Wikipedia after AI · diff.wikimedia.org ↗
- Graphite: in a Common Crawl sample, AI-written articles outnumbered human-written ones for the first time in November 2024; their share has plateaued since May 2024Media & information · Dead internet theory · graphite.io ↗
- A study of 51 Reddit communities in 2022–2024: machine-generated text is “marginally present”, but reaches up to 9% in some communities in some monthsMedia & information · Science · Dead internet theory · arxiv.org ↗
- Cloudflare: in July 2025 Anthropic's crawlers fetched about 38,000 pages per visitor referred to the site, OpenAI's about 1,100; nearly 80% of AI crawling is for trainingInternet & infrastructure · Media & information · Dead internet theory · blog.cloudflare.com ↗
- English Wikipedia editors adopt a speedy deletion rule: an administrator can quickly delete an obviously AI-generated article without the usual discussionMedia & information · Wikipedia after AI · 404media.co ↗
- Pew Research Center: when a Google results page shows an AI summary, users click a traditional result in 8% of visits versus 15% without one, and a link inside the summary in just 1%; Wikipedia is among the most cited sourcesMedia & information · Wikipedia after AI · pewresearch.org ↗
- Profound: across 680 million citations in AI answers (08.2024–06.2025), Wikipedia is ChatGPT's most cited source at 7.8% of all citations; Reddit leads for Google AI Overviews and PerplexityMedia & information · Wikipedia after AI · tryprofound.com ↗
- After an editor backlash, the Wikimedia Foundation pauses an experiment with machine-generated summaries at the top of mobile Wikipedia articles and promises no summaries without editor involvementMedia & information · Wikipedia after AI · 404media.co ↗
- Ahrefs: 74.2% of 900,000 new web pages from April 2025 contain AI-generated content; 2.5% are pure AI and 25.8% pure humanMedia & information · Internet & infrastructure · Dead internet theory · ahrefs.com ↗
- The Wikimedia Foundation publishes its AI strategy for editors: it will not replace them with AI but will use AI to remove technical barriersMedia & information · Work & jobs · Wikipedia after AI · wikimediafoundation.org ↗
- University of Zurich researchers secretly ran AI bots in Reddit's r/changemyview community; Reddit's chief legal officer calls the experiment “deeply wrong”Media & information · Science · Dead internet theory · 404media.co ↗
- Wikimedia Enterprise releases Wikipedia articles on Kaggle as structured JSON for machine learning, instead of scraping or parsing raw article textMedia & information · Software development · Wikipedia after AI · enterprise.wikimedia.com ↗
- Wikimedia Foundation: since January 2024 bandwidth for multimedia downloads has grown 50%, driven by bots; at least 65% of the most expensive traffic comes from bots, though they make up about 35% of pageviewsInternet & infrastructure · Media & information · Dead internet theory · diff.wikimedia.org ↗
- Lyu, Acemoglu and co-authors: after ChatGPT's launch, popular Wikipedia articles similar to its answers saw a greater decline in editing and viewership than othersMedia & information · Science · Wikipedia after AI · arxiv.org ↗
- Meta removes its AI character accounts on Instagram and Facebook after an outcry; the company calls them a 2023 testMedia & information · Dead internet theory · nbcnews.com ↗
- Brooks, Eggert and Peskoff (Princeton): AI detectors flag over 5% of newly created English Wikipedia articles as AI-generated; flagged articles are of lower quality and often self-promotionalMedia & information · Science · Wikipedia after AI · arxiv.org ↗
- 404 Media reports on WikiProject AI Cleanup, a group of Wikipedia editors who track down and remove unsourced AI-generated text from articlesMedia & information · Wikipedia after AI · 404media.co ↗
- Shumailov and co-authors in Nature: when trained indiscriminately on model-generated text, new models irreversibly lose the “tails” of the original distribution, a phenomenon called model collapseScience · Media & information · Large language model · nature.com ↗
- Epoch AI: the stock of public human-generated text is about 300 trillion tokens; at current rates, language model training will fully use it between 2026 and 2032Science · Media & information · Large language model · epoch.ai ↗
- Reeves, Yin and Simperl: in the year after ChatGPT's launch Wikipedia's views and edits did not fall — they only grew more slowly in languages where ChatGPT was availableMedia & information · Science · Wikipedia after AI · arxiv.org ↗
- The Stanford Internet Observatory studies 120 Facebook Pages that posted at least 50 AI-generated images each: the Feed shows them even to users who do not follow the PagesMedia & information · Dead internet theory · fsi9-prod.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com ↗
- Sora: video from a text descriptionMedia & information · Culture & arts · Generative video · en.wikipedia.org ↗
- Europol reissues its deepfakes report and removes the estimate of the future share of synthetic content (up to 90% by 2026 in the 2022 version) as coming from an inaccurate sourceMedia & information · Elections & politics · Dead internet theory · europol.europa.eu ↗
- The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft over training models on its articlesJustice & courts · Media & information · Large language model · nytco-assets.nytimes.com ↗
- The Wikimedia Foundation launches a Wikipedia plugin for ChatGPT, its first experiment with generative AI; by February 2024 the experiment ends: ChatGPT attributed Wikipedia as instructed in 68% of answersMedia & information · Education · Wikipedia after AI · diff.wikimedia.org ↗
- Eliezer Yudkowsky in TIME: a pause is not enough, the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI is that everyone on Earth will die; “Shut it all down”Media & information · Geopolitics & defense · AI safety · time.com ↗
- ChatGPT launchesEducation · Work & jobs · Media & information · Chatbots · openai.com ↗
- Whisper: open speech recognitionMedia & information · Software development · Speech recognition · en.wikipedia.org ↗
- The Atlantic brings the dead internet theory to mainstream media: it is “patently ridiculous” but has “a morsel of truth to it”Media & information · Dead internet theory · theatlantic.com ↗
- A post titled “Dead Internet Theory” appears on the Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe forum: most online content is supposedly made by AI and bots, and the internet “feels empty”Media & information · Culture & arts · Dead internet theory · forum.agoraroad.com ↗
- In GPT-3's training data Wikipedia is only 3% of the mix (3 billion tokens), yet the model saw it 3.4 times, versus less than once (0.44) for the bulk Common Crawl web dataMedia & information · Science · Wikipedia after AI · arxiv.org ↗
- GPT-2: OpenAI initially withholds the full model over the risk of misuseScience · Media & information · Large language model · openai.com ↗
- A Reddit user called deepfakes posts videos with swapped faces, and the term enters the languageMedia & information · Privacy & surveillance · Elections & politics · Deepfakes · wordorigins.org ↗
- Douyin launches; abroad, from 2017, as TikTokMedia & information · Mind & relationships · Recommender systems · en.wikipedia.org ↗
- Microsoft's chatbot Tay picks up users' insults within a day and is shut downMedia & information · Values & religion · Chatbots · en.wikipedia.org ↗
- Ian Goodfellow: generative adversarial networks (GANs)Science · Media & information · Generative AI · arxiv.org ↗
- IBM Watson beats the champions of the TV quiz show Jeopardy!Science · Media & information · Question answering · techcrunch.com ↗
- Instagram launchesMedia & information · Mind & relationships · Culture & arts · Social networks · en.wikipedia.org ↗
- Netflix announces Watch Now streamingCulture & arts · Media & information · Online video · about.netflix.com ↗
- Apple unveils the iPhoneHome & family · Media & information · Business & markets · Smartphone · engadget.com ↗
- The first tweet: the start of TwitterMedia & information · Elections & politics · Social networks · guinnessworldrecords.com ↗
- YouTube is foundedMedia & information · Culture & arts · Online video · itpro.com ↗
- John Gruber introduces Markdown, an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format for web writersSoftware development · Media & information · Markdown · daringfireball.net ↗
- Facebook launchesMedia & information · Mind & relationships · Social networks · historyhit.com ↗
- Wikipedia launches: an encyclopedia written by volunteersMedia & information · Education · Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org ↗
- Google launches AdWords: ads tied to the search queryBusiness & markets · Media & information · Search advertising · en.wikipedia.org ↗
- Ward Cunningham opens WikiWikiWeb, the first wiki; text there is marked up with ordinary characters: two apostrophes for italics, three for bold, an asterisk for a list itemSoftware development · Media & information · Markdown · wiki.c2.com ↗