Dhrumil Mehta

Today at #datajconf: we talked about what we've learned about pedagogy in the process of running datajournalismteachers.club. Focused on grounding data journalism in tools *and* humanities, teaching with a learner-centered rather than a "banking" model, and how we learn in community. Join the club!

Why AI models are bad at verifying photos Many of the latest large language models, including OpenAI’s recently released GPT-5, tout an impressive capability: reasoning about images. We have seen viral trends of AI models geolocating obscure ...

Great work by @aisvarya17.bsky.social and @klaudia.bsky.social. Read more below!

www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

Can AI tools fact-check images? The Tow Center tested 10 images, asking AI tools to: 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗺 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹 and identify its 𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲, and 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲.

Results were...well, there's a lot of red on this chart.

Read the research here:
www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

A New Report Takes On the Future of News and Search The Tow Center for Digital Journalism interviewed news and tech industry representatives about AI’s impact on platforms and publishers. They expressed some hope and a lot of trepidation.

The latest from the Tow Center:
We interviewed news and tech industry representatives about AI’s impact on platforms and publishers. They expressed some hope and a lot of trepidation. @klaudia.bsky.social @columjournreview.bsky.social @columbiajournalism.bsky.social
www.cjr.org/the_media_to...

We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News. AI search tools are rapidly gaining in popularity, with nearly one in four Americans now saying they have used AI in place of traditional search engines. These tools derive their value from crawling t...

🔍 AI Search Engines: popular, but potentially problematic.

A new study from the @towcenter.bsky.social reveals the hidden pitfalls in AI-powered search, like misattribution, misinformation and missing citations:
www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

“AI search” has a citation problem.

Latest from @towcenter.bsky.social

www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

Yes please! Just started BlueSky-ing. Thanks!

We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News. AI search tools are rapidly gaining in popularity, with nearly one in four Americans now saying they have used AI in place of traditional search engines. These tools derive their value from crawling t...

This has implications for news publishers who are considering making deals with AI companies. More on that in the piece. www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

It turns out this problem extends to many other chatbots too. In @towcenter.bsky.social's tests, they often cited the wrong article, and sometimes also fabricated links & cited syndicated or plagiarized articles instead of the original.

This builds on prior tests showing that ChatGPT frequently cited the wrong source article, but rarely expressed uncertainty. If it didn't know the answer (at least to the kinds of questions we asked), it confidently made one up. cjr.org/tow_center/how-chatgpt-misrepresents-publisher-content.php

Using AI search tools for research? Tow Center asked 8 AI search tools to find the source of excerpts from news articles (something Google search does pretty well). They often cited the wrong sources with confidence.

Find @aisvarya17.bsky.social at #NICAR25 to hear more.
🧵Thread w/ findings below👇

[graph] Generative search tools were often confidently wrong in our study

Are you using Generative AI tools as your search engine? @towcenter.bsky.social ran a test to see how often they cite news articles correctly given direct quotes from them.

Results are troubling.

www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

Great work by @aisvarya17.bsky.social and @klaudia.bsky.social

NICAR Scavenger Hunt The NICAR25 Scavenger Hunt. Brought to you by the Data Journalism Teachers' Club.

Hello #NICAR25!

Are you an educator who is bringing students to NICAR? Sign them up for the NICAR Scavenger Hunt!

nicarscavengerhunt.com

Students interview working journalists about things they’re learning in your class and you get new example stories related to your course content. Yay!