John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged journalism · everything

Futurism

AI Is Creating "Doom Loops" All Over the Economy

Unredacted legal documents from the New York Times' copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI reveal internal company admissions that AI creates "doom loops"—systems where AI monetizes human-created content while simultaneously destroying the economic incentives and conditions needed to produce that content in the first place. The article catalogs these doom loops across journalism, music, film, education, and recruitment, showing how AI companies knowingly built business models that cannibalize their own supply chains and harm workers across creative industries. Microsoft's own internal documents acknowledged this paradox explicitly: the technology relies on fresh cultural content to function while the products themselves undermine creators' ability to earn livelihoods, ultimately threatening the open web and broader economy.

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www.nytimes.com

Opinion | ChatGPT Is Already Changing How I Do My Job

Manjoo describes how ChatGPT is already becoming an indispensable tool in his journalism workflow and others', comparable to past tech breakthroughs like the iPhone and Google search. He outlines specific practical uses—finding the right word, overcoming writer's block, and summarizing complex documents—while emphasizing the critical caveat that journalists must treat ChatGPT's output as unreliable without verification, since it frequently generates false information and operates as a black box. The piece warns that while the technology shows genuine promise for newsrooms, publications must develop careful guidelines for its use, particularly when it comes to selecting sources or framing questions, since relying on this "mysterious oracle" for editorial decisions risks embedding unknown biases into journalistic work.

Permalink technologyaiopinionethics

nymag.com

The Secrets of the JFK Assassination Documents

Scott Sayare's piece traces how journalist Jefferson Morley, using declassified files from the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, uncovered that CIA officer George Joannides—secretly Oswald-era handler of the anti-Castro group DRE—was deceptively installed as the Agency's liaison to the 1970s House Select Committee on Assassinations, blocking scrutiny of his own prior role. The article builds the case that CIA headquarters knowingly falsified cables about Oswald before the assassination and then spent decades stonewalling congressional and independent investigators (HSCA, the Church Committee, the ARRB), while also probing the limits and possible overreach of Morley's own escalating theories about Oswald as a CIA "agent of influence." It's a dense, well-sourced anatomy of institutional cover-up and the perils of obsessive truth-seeking, worth keeping as one of the more sober, document-driven accounts of the assassination's unresolved CIA angle.

Permalink politicsjournalisminvestigation

medium.com

52 things I learned in 2020 - Magnetic Notes - Medium

This is Tom Whitwell's annual "52 things I learned" roundup, a grab-bag list of curious facts and findings gathered over the year rather than a single argument—covering everything from why municipal trees are planted male, to the hidden Fetal Bovine Serum in lab-grown meat, to attractive criminals getting lighter sentences, to Warsaw's clam-powered water safety system. It's worth keeping as a dense trivia stockpile with sourced links for each claim, useful for dinner-party facts, writing hooks, or spotting patterns across unrelated fields like tech, biology, economics, and history.

Permalink technologyculturehistoryenergy

This American Life

This American Life

This American Life

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