Dr. Jay Barchas-Lichtenstein (they/them)

Sign at the airport with a quote from Lao Tzu: "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."

JFK is setting expectations really low these days, huh?

What does responsible use of AI look like for the future of journalism?

CNTI's @drnycnerd.bsky.social will discuss ways AI is reshaping newsrooms as part of First Amendment Day at UNC.

🗓️ Wednesday, October 8, 2025
🕚 11:00 a.m.
📍 UNC
✅ Free and open to the public

Full details: lnkd.in/g-y2FyUE

How Serbia could use EU Digital Services Act for state censorship The implementation of the EU's Digital Services Act in Serbia and other countries lacking an independent digital services coordinator risks becoming an EU-based tool for state repression, enabling rul...

In Serbia, a leaked recording has raised fears of political attempts to weaken independent media. As the country adopts the EU’s DSA, a question looms: Will this law protect press freedom—or be misused to suppress it?

👉 Read more from @ewrightwy.bsky.social:
euobserver.com/eu-and-the-w...

Eat. Sleep. Exercise. Nurture the relationships that sustain you. Protect your health. Find joy. Don't mistake any of these for the resistance itself. Joy isn't resistance, neither is rest. But you need to be whole to resist for a lifetime.

Don't call it a Substack. - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

It’s weird to me that people keep starting new Substacks and still don’t know that Substack is extremely bad news

Please get off Substack 😭

www.anildash.com//2024/11/19/...

GPT-5 is so amazing it can make 52.8 higher than 69.1 on a bar chart

It can even make 69.1 and 30.8 THE SAME SIZE

The real secret about genius is that it refers to an emotional experience in the perceiver, not a quality in the perceived. It's an amazing feeling, when someone lights up your brain with their skill. It's why I love my job. But it is a feeling, not an objective event

Even worse!

They get to pretend they're accountable?

Is this ConEd by any chance?

Some things researchers can do:
- ask about specific tools or use cases or outputs
- discourse analysis to tease out what's included in "AI" policy documents, the media, etc.
- interviews and thinkalouds to suss out what people think "AI" is

I finished reading "The AI Con" last week and I'm going to be sitting with it for a long time.

As a researcher it affirms my frustration with the slipperiness of "AI" as a term. All the research shows that people don't understand it consistently.

What do we do if we're already a monthly donor and we desperately want a pin? Asking for ... a friend?

Briefing #1: AI Literacy & Communication July 2025

What do news organizations actually need to know about AI & journalism? A new briefing from @cnti.bsky.social's Global AI & Journalism Research Working Group synthesizes 80+ research studies.

cnti.org/article/aij-...

🥇 Black: The good, normal way to have coffee

🥈 Milk, no sugar: Not bad at all, but superfluous (unless the coffee is too strong)

🥉 Milk and sugar: Fine if I think of it not as coffee, but as a coffee-flavoured dessert (affogato lite?)

💩 Sugar, no milk: O gods this is vile, why would you do this

This briefing is the first in a series. Stay tuned for more!

If you'd like to suggest topics or research to include, please reach out.

5. The research consistently shows that explaining *how* AI was used is more valuable than stating *that* AI was used -- "AI" is a broad umbrella term that means different things to different audiences.

4. Covering AI effectively benefits from both understanding the technology deeply and hearing from the broadest possible range of stakeholders.

3. One big challenge for public understanding is that AI tools upend previous assumptions about how technology works: their outputs are not consistent (unlike, say, a calendar) and they're often "under the hood" such that people may not even know they're interacting with one.

2. The public needs a better understanding of different types of AI systems, their strengths and limitations, and how to critically evaluate their output. This is a real opportunity: journalism is one of the main ways people learn about new technology.

We find a few key recurring themes:
1. Better communication about newsrooms' methods and values, not just their use of AI tools, could help audiences understand the work of journalism.

Briefing #1: AI Literacy & Communication July 2025

What do news organizations actually need to know about AI & journalism? A new briefing from @cnti.bsky.social's Global AI & Journalism Research Working Group synthesizes 80+ research studies.

cnti.org/article/aij-...

Gaza is starving. Where are the American Jewish leaders? A fear of being labelled antisemitic still deters American Jews and Jewish institutions from taking a position that is morally correct.

The mass starvation & killing of Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli gov’t is a chillul hashem, a desecration of God.

Jewish leaders who criticized Zohran Mamdani for three words he doesn’t use should raise their voices loudly here as well.
forward.com/opinion/7575...

Setting aside the ethical and environmental concerns of AI, I'm really offended by a bunch of elite dudes telling us our minds aren't good enough when they've had to steal everything human minds have created to create their pretend mind and it doesn't even work right!

Now Anthropic is strongly considering weekly limits on Claude Code. Users making it clear they won't accept this or pay more than $200 a month. I am confident this happens because as my analysis suggests they are losing tons of money on each user!
www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode...

What journalists and the public think of journalism and technology Researchers shed light on a mismatch between how journalists and the public view journalism in the age of artificial intelligence.

What do we know about how journalists and the public think about "journalism" and the people who create it?

This was fun to work on -- my colleague Sam is so, so smart!

journalistsresource.org/media/what-j...

It's all a distraction. Why are we even talking about what a candidate did as a literal child?

It is such a clear and straightforward explanation of why the amount of coverage matters more than tone.

Speaking as both a NYC voter and a media researcher, I think this is well worth a read.

I'm not going to reskeet the skeet that made me feel the need to say this but: NYC is a very Jewish city - public schools are closed for Yom Kippur. It's also a very Muslim city - public schools are closed for Ramadan. It's also one of the most Catholic cities in the nation.

Screenshot of the forecast. It's predicted to be 79 degrees Fahrenheit tomorrow, which is 24 degrees cooler than today.

Sweet relief is coming soon: