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Chris Moran

@chrismoranuk.bsky.social
3.9K followers 153 following 109 posts

Guardian's head of editorial innovation. Focusing on AI in the newsroom

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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
I am so pleased we have Daniel Susskind writing for us today about LLMs, parenting and learning (and not just because he mentions my little project PlotLines). It’s essential we have informed, balanced dialogues about GenAI’s strengths and weaknesses www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
I’m a father of three who studies the impact of artificial intelligence: this is what parents need to know about AI
A Dr Seuss-style story written in seconds alerted me to the power – and perils – of the technology. But how can children embrace it without forgetting core skills?
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
AI is changing the way we work and think, but that change isn’t only negative. This is a reflection on the potential for AI to deepen our relationship with literature by creating tools, and through the conversations we have with machines in building them peter-guillam123.github.io/plotlines/es...
peter-guillam123.github.io
Large Learning Models: why conversations with LLMs are an education in themselves
How an idle conversation with my daughter led to PlotLines, and why the tool itself is less important than the conversations we had with the machine that built it.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
A little bit of AI joy, I hope. It started as a simple way to help my daughter get a grip on Dracula and David Copperfield... and in a week it's turned into an agentic system that can parse a text, plot it and direct the story on a map. peter-guillam123.github.io/plotlines/
peter-guillam123.github.io
PlotLines — the classics, mapped
Every journey in the book, played out on a genuine period map — out-of-copyright novels and plays, followed stop by stop from Frankenstein to Shakespeare.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
I love this piece from our brilliant lead engineer on newsroom AI, Joseph Smith. If you're non-technical but looking for a deeper understanding of how LLMs work beyond the basics, it's a fantastically clear and useful place to start medium.com/@joelochlann...
medium.com
MythBusting Large Language Models
Chatbots can be deceptive. How do LLMs actually work under the hood?
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
This 40m video is a brilliant articulation of where we are now with LLMs and a thoughtful reflection on autonomy, agency, software and where we go next. I love the phrase "jagged intelligence" and using Memento's protagonist as an articulation of context windows. Do watch youtu.be/LCEmiRjPEtQ?...
youtu.be
Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)
YouTube video by Y Combinator
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
This is an excellent, thoughtful, nuanced piece on the role AI can play in writing www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/m...
nytimes.com
A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
So much energy is being put into the long-term impact of GenAI on journalism and short-term issues like whether we're using the latest models. But this video illustrates the immediate crucial issue: do journalists have a basic grasp on the ways LLMs work? x.com/SamCoatesSky...
x.com
Sam Coates Sky on X: "How AI lied and gaslit me: 🤯💣🔥 Won’t lie: what happened to me this week made my jaw drop Do watch: https://t.co/mgmkvR9XSx" / X
How AI lied and gaslit me: 🤯💣🔥 Won’t lie: what happened to me this week made my jaw drop Do watch: https://t.co/mgmkvR9XSx
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
“Secure Messaging is not just a tool for the Guardian. As part of our commitment to protecting the media and the public interest globally, the Guardian has published the source code for the technology that enables this system” www.theguardian.com/membership/2...
theguardian.com
In a dangerous era for journalism – a powerful new tool to help protect sources
Today, the Guardian, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, launches Secure Messaging, a world-first from a media organisation
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
Eeeessh. This really, really isn’t good. If user behaviour is changing so much and search is changing so much, and actually the changes are not really affecting clickthrough… why not let us see all that?
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
Google IO underlines that the battleground has moved from models as the competitive edge. This second age is about integration and with Workspace, Chrome, Search, Android and more (and the appetite to push Gemini everywhere), Google has a clear advantage www.theverge.com/news/669408/...
theverge.com
The 15 biggest announcements at Google I/O 2025
Catch up on what you missed.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
As usual @polemicdigital.com is essential reading: “The theory is that extensive usage of LLMs drives increased Google usage with users wanting to verify the generative AI output with actual trusted sources, turning to Google to find those sources.” www.seoforgooglenews.com/p/googles-ai...
seoforgooglenews.com
Google's AI Adventure - One Year On
A year after the introduction of AI Overviews, let's look at the impact on publishers' traffic and visibility and what's next in store for AI in search.
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Eduardo Suárez @eduardosuarez.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
I wrote this piece on three serious challenges journalism faces right now and how AI may make them worse if we don't change course It is based on panels and private conversations in Perugia and includes my favourite quote from @chrismoranuk.bsky.social #ijf25 www.linkedin.com/pulse/journa...
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Felix M. Simon @felixsimon.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
And I should add a plug to the panel I organise with @chrismoranuk.bsky.social, @rubinafillion.nytimes.com & Tess Jeffers. Now the hard part: evaluating and integrating AI in newsrooms 14:00 - 14:50, Saturday 12/04/2025 – Teatro del Pavone buff.ly/NCJkUCN
buff.ly
Now the hard part: evaluating and integrating AI in newsrooms
As the integration of (generative) AI technologies into news organisations continues apace, the need for robust, transparent, and consistent evaluation frameworks has become increasingly pressing.…
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
This is a thread of recent articles written for @techpolicypress.bsky.social that, I think, tell something of a story about AI and how we got to where we are.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
Only just started to play with NotebookLM's new Mind Maps feature, but for journalists trying to parse large documents or collections of them, it seems an interesting way of seeing the broad landscape and then getting into the detail by clicking a node, as an alternative to asking specific questions
A "mind map" in NotebookLM showing a breakdown of the concepts in the UK government AI and Copyright consultation
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
Innovation continues apace in the LLM world (where innovation = ruthlessly Sherlocking everyone else's features). Canvas is Claude's Artifacts feature. For those without access to Claude, it's undoubtedly a useful and versatile tool, especially for product ideation gemini.google/overview/can...
gemini.google
Gemini Canvas - write, code, & create in one space with AI
Gemini Canvas is your interactive space to write, code, and create. Go from idea to creation in minutes.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
Two things to highlight: the inevitability of this outcome (as predicted in GPT4's System Card) and the shrewd observation that LLMs, for all their benefits, are the perfect tool for endlessly voracious social platforms that prioritise novelty, triviality and outrage www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a...
404media.co
AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality
Generative AI spammers are brute forcing the internet, and it is working.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
“Students are not merely passive recipients of AI-generated content; instead, they are engaging actively with AI-based tools to augment their research processes, enhance comprehension, and construct well-informed, analytically-robust academic texts.” www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
University students describe how they adopt AI for writing and research in a general education course - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - University students describe how they adopt AI for writing and research in a general education course
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klaudia jaźwińska @klaudia.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
This post is misleading. We were testing specifically to see whether the chatbots accurately identified the sources of excerpts from news articles. We did not intend to extrapolate these findings to the overall accuracy of the chatbots.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
This is worth reading if you’re interested in deep research AI tools: “Used uncritically, AI research assistants risk perpetuating a cycle where only easily discoverable sources are read and cited in research products” theimportantwork.substack.com/p/why-ai-ass...
theimportantwork.substack.com
Why AI-assisted Literature Reviews Currently Fall Short
The tale of the long tail
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
Excellent to see this gap covered. Previously saving your NotebookLM responses lost the elegant citations that make the tool as a whole so useful
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Chris Stokel-Walker @stokel.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
🚨 @newscientist.com SCOOP: I've exclusively obtained Peter Kyle's interactions with ChatGPT using FOI laws - in what I believe may be a world-first transparency release. The chatbot said "Lack of Government or Institutional Support" slowed UK AI adoption www.newscientist.com/article/2472...
newscientist.com
Revealed: How the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice
New Scientist has used freedom of information laws to obtain the ChatGPT records of Peter Kyle, the UK's technology secretary, in what is believed to be a world-first use of such legislation
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
I’m posting quite a lot less about incremental AI changes these days. But this is where most people’s eyes should be in terms of impact, risk and corporate power struggles. With models becoming less distinct and moats shrinking, it all becomes about integration and scale blog.google/products/sea...
blog.google
Expanding AI Overviews and introducing AI Mode
AI Mode is a new generative AI experiment in Google Search.
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Felix M. Simon @felixsimon.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
I am delighted to share this new paper on AI collaboration in Chinese news organisations, led by @qingxiaohci.bsky.social‬, which has just been accepted at #CHI25. buff.ly/4gCc7hb
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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
New from 404 Media: anyone can push updates to the Doge.gov site. Two sources independently found the issue, one made their own decision to deface the site. "THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN." www.404media.co/anyone-can-p...
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
This is a really thoughtful, balanced and interesting piece on practical, responsible ways that LLMs might make marking easier while retaining the core human skills that make it a valuable exercise substack.nomoremarking.com/p/the-human-...
substack.nomoremarking.com
The human in the loop
Human assessment in the age of AI
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Charlie Beckett @charliebeckett.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
Please define 'chutzpah'
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Chris Stokel-Walker @stokel.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
My main take from the UK government's AI announcement as a journalist and a British sitcom obsessive is that tech teams always have a wicked sense of humour when naming their products www.gov.uk/government/n...
gov.uk
Shake up of tech and AI usage across NHS and other public services to deliver plan for change
The government has announced a new plan to leverage technology and AI tools like
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
Good call from Apple edition.cnn.com/2025/01/16/m...
edition.cnn.com
Apple is pulling its AI-generated notifications for news after generating fake headlines | CNN Business
Apple is temporarily pulling its newly introduced artificial intelligence feature that summarizes news notifications after it repeatedly sent users error-filled headlines, sparking backlash from a new...
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
The ‘gift’ that just keeps giving. Here’s what I wrote about this the time before last www.linkedin.com/pulse/alerts...
linkedin.com
Alerts, AI and accountability
The story last week of how Apple Intelligence took an accurate news alert, summarised it along with a number of other alerts and ended up suggesting that the BBC had reported that Luigi Mangione had s...
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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
NEW: Meta has quietly dismantled the system that prevented misinformation from spreading in the United States. Machine-learning classifiers that once identified viral hoaxes and limited their reach have now been switched off, Platformer has learned www.platformer.news/meta-ends-mi...
Behind the scenes, the company was also quietly dismantling a system to prevent the spread of misinformation. When the company announced on Jan. 7 that it would end its fact-checking partnerships, the company also instructed teams responsible for ranking content in the company’s apps to stop penalizing misinformation, according to sources and an internal document obtained by Platformer.

The result is that the sort of viral hoaxes that ran roughshod over the platform during the 2016 US presidential election — “Pope Francis endorses Trump,” Pizzagate, and all the rest — are now just as eligible for free amplification on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as true stories.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
OpenAI’s economic blueprint: “Automobiles weren’t invented [in America]. But in the UK where some of the earliest cars were introduced, growth was stunted by regulation.” cdn.openai.com/global-affai...
cdn.openai.com
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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 14/01/2025
This was not, from the perspective of content creators, a terribly reassuring exchange. thecritic.co.uk/robot-dreams/
There were several questions about whether it was really safe to hand NHS data to tech companies, to which the answer was always that we needed to stop worrying. Why we should trust people who built their previous AI engines by simply stealing the text of 183,000 books wasn’t explained. 

Afterwards I asked Matt Clifford, Starmer’s AI adviser, about this, and he claimed ignorance of the biggest copyright theft in history, which seems a strange knowledge gap. Perhaps Clifford was trained on a different dataset. The suggestion that authors and artists might not be delighted to see their work stolen seemed to rile him, but just as he was becoming interestingly snippy about the way in which cynics were holding the country back, he was dragged away by a civil servant, so we never found out why it is so vital to human progress that my books are ripped off by a bunch of billionaires. 

Hoping for answers, I turned to the report on the subject that Clifford has just produced, which contains a single reference to copyright, and complains that “uncertainty” over intellectual property rules are holding back the data miners. The government proposes to deal with this in much the same way that the Metropolitan Police has dealt with the “uncertainty” over actual property laws that was holding back central London bike thieves.
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Jack Stilgoe @jackstilgoe.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
Quite right. I don't think this is about making MPs better at computer science; it's about rebuilding public sector technology assessment capacity. Used to be done in national labs and by regulators. With AI, the privatisation of expertise is the biggest challenge.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 09/01/2025
The always essential RISJ Trends Report for 2025 is out today. "Multiple challenges in 2025 will likely include attacks from hostile politicians, economic headwinds, and battles to protect IP in the face of rapacious AI-driven platforms" reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-m...
reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2025
Our annual survey of over 300 media leaders from across the world explores publishers' priorities for the year ahead, the challenges they envision and how well equipped they are to address them.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
"We're gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers." Oh marvellous. www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-...
nbcnews.com
Meta is ending its fact-checking program in favor of a 'community notes' system similar to X
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company's moderation policies and practices, saying that the election felt like a "cultural tipping point."
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Robyn Vinter @robynvinter.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
Morning from the Yorkshire Dales! We have now entered day three snowed in at the Tan Hill Inn, Britain's highest pub
a picture taken from inside a cosy pub at breakfast time with coffee cups on the table and snow covering the windows
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Max Woolf @minimaxir.bsky.social · 02/01/2025
New year, new blog post: I had a random question, what happens when LLMs are prompted to write better code, again and again? Do they actually write better code? The answer is yes*! minimaxir.com/2025/01/writ...
minimaxir.com
Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”?
Most coders want AI to write code faster: I want AI to write FASTER CODE.
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 31/12/2024
Here's my end-of-year review of things we learned out about LLMs in 2024 - we learned a LOT of things simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/... Table of contents:

    The GPT-4 barrier was comprehensively broken
    Some of those GPT-4 models run on my laptop
    LLM prices crashed, thanks to competition and increased efficiency
    Multimodal vision is common, audio and video are starting to emerge
    Voice and live camera mode are science fiction come to life
    Prompt driven app generation is a commodity already
    Universal access to the best models lasted for just a few short months
    “Agents” still haven’t really happened yet
    Evals really matter
    Apple Intelligence is bad, Apple’s MLX library is excellent
    The rise of inference-scaling “reasoning” models
    Was the best currently available LLM trained in China for less than $6m?
    The environmental impact got better
    The environmental impact got much, much worse
    The year of slop
    Synthetic training data works great
    LLMs somehow got even harder to use
    Knowledge is incredibly unevenly distributed
    LLMs need better criticism
    Everything tagged “llms” on my blog in 2024
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Jim Waterson @jim.londoncentric.media · 02/01/2025
It’s three months since I launched London Centric, so here’s what’s happened and a little bit on what’s next. open.substack.com/pub/londonce...
open.substack.com
The best of London Centric, so far
The investigations, exclusives, and intrigue you might have missed.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
“Like all Netflix movies, Bubble and The Bubble floated away as quickly as they appeared, becoming tiles in the company’s sprawling mosaic of content, destined to be autoplayed on laptops whose owners have fallen asleep.” www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/ess...
nplusonemag.com
Casual Viewing | Will Tavlin
A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses. Customers who held onto their DVDs for longer...
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
“At best, they say, Orion performs better than OpenAI’s current offerings, but hasn’t advanced enough to justify the enormous cost of keeping the new model running.” www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...
wsj.com
The Next Great Leap in AI Is Behind Schedule and Crazy Expensive
The startup has run into problem after problem on its new artificial-intelligence project, code-named Orion.
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Arvind Narayanan @randomwalker.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
New AI Snake Oil essay: Last month the AI industry's narrative suddenly flipped — model scaling is dead, but "inference scaling" is taking over. This has left people outside AI confused. What changed? Is AI capability progress slowing? We look at the evidence. 🧵 www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-ai-prog...
Declaring the death of model scaling is premature.

Regardless of whether model scaling will continue, industry leaders’ flip flopping on this issue shows the folly of trusting their forecasts. They are not significantly better informed than the rest of us, and their narratives are heavily influenced by their vested interests.

Inference scaling is real, and there is a lot of low-hanging fruit, which could lead to rapid capability increases in the short term. But in general, capability improvements from inference scaling will likely be both unpredictable and unevenly distributed among domains.

The connection between capability improvements and AI’s social or economic impacts is extremely weak. The bottlenecks for impact are the pace of product development and the rate of adoption, not AI capabilities.
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Kate Knibbs @knibbs.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
There are a LOT of ongoing AI copyright lawsuits in the US right now. We've been keeping track at @wired.com—and, to make things easier on everyone, created this interactive visual guide. It'll be updated w/ any major developments: www.wired.com/story/ai-cop...
wired.com
Every AI Copyright Lawsuit in the US, Visualized
WIRED is following every copyright battle involving the AI industry—and we’ve created some handy visualizations that will be updated as the cases progress.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
The moral of this story is not that genAI has no role to play around news, but that it requires a deep level of thought about what potential risks are. This should have been predictable for anyone with an ounce of knowledge about journalism and this technology www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Apple urged to scrap AI feature after it creates false headline
Reporters Without Borders has called for Apple to remove Apple Intelligence.
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
"We hope our benchmark will spur industry-wide progress on factuality and grounding." deepmind.google/discover/blo...
deepmind.google
FACTS Grounding: A new benchmark for evaluating the factuality of large language models
Our comprehensive benchmark and online leaderboard offer a much-needed measure of how accurately LLMs ground their responses in provided source material and avoid hallucinations
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Felix M. Simon @felixsimon.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
Great story by @melissahei.bsky.social et al on data use in AI training — with this graphic of particular interest to news publishers (because it shows an estimated proportion of news content vs other content)
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
A few thoughts on Apple Intelligence, alerts and when summarisation goes wrong... www.linkedin.com/pulse/alerts...
linkedin.com
Alerts, AI and accountability
The story last week of how Apple Intelligence took an accurate news alert, summarised it along with a number of other alerts and ended up suggesting that the BBC had reported that Luigi Mangione had s...
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Chris Moran @chrismoranuk.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
NotebookLM's very lovely new look is now live and there are some really positive improvements. Following soon are the new interactive podcast features which sound like fun blog.google/technology/g...
blog.google
NotebookLM gets a new look, audio interactivity and a premium version
NotebookLM is introducing new features, and a premium version called NotebookLM Plus.
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Reuters Institute @reutersinstitute.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
NEW on our website How 2024 shaped journalism. Dozens of insights from the Reuters Institute's work summarised by @eduardosuarez.bsky.social @matthewleake.bsky.social @marinaadami.bsky.social and Gretel Kahn Click to read reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/how-202...
reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
How 2024 shaped journalism: insights from the Reuters Institute’s work
From AI to digital platforms, our researchers and reporters have explored the future of journalism this year. Here’s what they found.
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