Dr. Jay Barchas-Lichtenstein (they/them)

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:

It's been toaster oven, instant pot and salads over here.

Well ... I did hard-boil some eggs on Monday, and my conclusion was that I did not need to do that again until the temps were safely back in double digits.

absolutely nobody needs to be using their stove or oven today.

This series is so powerful and so hard to read and so, so, so important right now.

A Letter from Nigeria In the darkest and most ferocious moments of Nigeria's totalitarian experience, two survival strategies worked for us: courage and community. Courage from journalists, but also courage from publishers...

The next letter in @cnti.bsky.social 's press freedom series is up today. It's a beautiful meditation on what Nigeria can teach the US:

cnti.org/guest-essay/...

A Letter from Serbia In Serbia, media freedom has never been a given. We have never had a solid foundation of transparency or accountability. Journalists have been working under pressure for decades.

I'm so excited about @cnti.bsky.social 's series of "letters from the field" on press freedom.

Today's letter comes from Serbian journalist Teodora Ćurčić: cnti.org/guest-essay/...

I'm pretty sure he was talking like sharp creases up the whole front, like suit that has just been pressed level.

@rukhshanamedia.bsky.social continues to tell the stories the Taliban don’t want to be heard.

In our first "Letter from the Field," @zahrajoya.bsky.social explains what American journalists can learn from her experiences fighting for #pressfreedom in Afghanistan. bit.ly/4kvRfLk