What Hundreds of Focus Groups With Trump Voters Revealed; The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, October 23, 2026

Ezra Klein

Produced by Annie Galvin and Jack McCordick

, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; What Hundreds of Focus Groups With Trump Voters Revealed

[Ezra Klein] "What changes in politics — or what have you watched change in politics — as it has become more, in your language here, vibe oriented?

[Sarah Longwell] "I think it’s the big difference between news seekers and news receivers.

We used to live in a world where you spent time with the news, and it was a specific time. You sat down at the breakfast table, and you read a newspaper. You watched the evening news. You made time for the news.

I just think that the news receiver means: I didn’t sit down to find something out. Information just washed over me, and there was no mechanism to verify it. I didn’t really sit and spend time with it and ask: Is this true? Does it even matter to me? It just hit me for a second.

It just flashes over them. So they wake up with an opinion without any idea of how it was formed."

Books by Bots: Librarians grapple with AI-generated material in collections; American Libraries, September 2, 2025

Reema Saleh  , American Libraries; Books by Bots: Librarians grapple with AI-generated material in collections

"How to Spot AI-Generated Books

Once an AI-generated book has made it to your library, it will likely give itself away with telltale signs such as jumbled, repetitive, or contradicting sentences; glaring grammatical errors or false statements; or digital art that looks too smooth around the corners.

Of course, if you can get a digital sneak-peek inside a book before ordering, all the better. But if not, how can you head off AI content so it never arrives on your desk? The following tips can help.

• Look into who the author is and how “real” they seem, says Robin Bradford, a collection development librarian at a public library in Washington. An author with no digital footprint is a red flag, especially if they are credited with a slew of titles each year. Also a red flag: a book with no author listed at all.
• Exercise caution regarding self-published books, small presses, or platforms such as Amazon, which filters out less AI-generated content than other vendors do.
• Think about whether the book is capitalizing on the chance that a reader will confuse it with another, more popular book, says Jane Stimpson, a library instruction and educational technology consultant for the Massachusetts Library System. Does it have a cover similar to that of an existing bestseller? Just as animated Disney movies get imitated by low-budget knockoffs, popular titles get imitated by AI-generated books.
• Check if there is mention of AI use in the Library of Congress record associated with the book, says Sarah Manning, a collection development librarian at Boise (Idaho) Public Library (BPL). If the book has been registered with the US Copyright Office, its record may mention AI."

How news coverage, often uncritical, helps build up the AI hype; Reuters Institute, May 20, 2024

Prof. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen , Reuters Institute; How news coverage, often uncritical, helps build up the AI hype

"“I would put media reporting [about AI] at around two out of 10,” David Reid, professor of Artificial Intelligence at Liverpool Hope University, said to the BBC earlier this year. “When the media talks about AI, they think of it as a single entity. It is not. What I would like to see is more nuanced reporting.”

While some individual journalists and outlets are highly respected for their reporting on AI, overall, social science research on news media coverage of artificial intelligence provides some support for Reid’s assessment.

Some working in the technology industry may feel very put upon – a few years ago Zachary Lipton, then an assistant professor at the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, was quoted in the Guardian calling media coverage of artificial intelligence “sensationalised crap” and likening it to an “AI misinformation epidemic”. In private conversations, many computer scientists and technologists working in the private sector echo his complaints, decrying what several describe as relentlessly negative coverage obsessed with “killer robots.”"

Sure, Google’s AI overviews could be useful – if you like eating rocks; The Guardian, June 1, 2024

 John Naughton, The Guardian; Sure, Google’s AI overviews could be useful – if you like eating rocks

"To date, some of this searching suggests subhuman capabilities, or perhaps just human-level gullibility. At any rate, users have been told that glue is useful for ensuring that cheese sticks to pizza, that they could stare at the sun for for up to 30 minutes, and that geologists suggest eating one rock per day (presumably to combat iron deficiency). Memo to Google: do not train your AI on Reddit or the Onion."

Gwyneth Paltrow didn't want Condé Nast to fact-check Goop articles; The Guardian, July 25, 2018

Sam Wolfson, The Guardian; Gwyneth Paltrow didn't want Condé Nast to fact-check Goop articles

"“I think for us it was really like we like to work where we are in an expansive space. Somewhere like Condé, understandably, there are a lot of rules,” Paltrow told the Times, adding that they were a company that “do things in a very old-school way”.

She argued that they were interviewing experts and didn’t need to check what they were saying was scientifically accurate. “We’re never making statements,” she said. Elise Loehnen, Goop’s head of content, added that Goop was “just asking questions”."