This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss AI and spirituality.

JASON: I think we’ve generally carved out a pretty good lane for ourselves in the broader AI debate, writing about its current capabilities, its current harms, and the fact it was trained on stolen content without saying that it will never be able to do anything of use. We are often tinkering with AI so that we can write about it from an informed perspective, and so every once in a while, while I’m working on a story I will see something where it feels like AI could possibly be useful for some specific part of the reporting. 

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss inbox slop, Claude cults, and more.

JOSEPH: This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Jason and Emanuel covered iLands, the AI agents that email people offering to do work. My thing isn’t exactly the same, but similar.

For months, I’ve been noticing that many people email me ‘tips’ (I put in quotation marks because they’re sometimes not tips, but more, my Instagram account was banned, please help me) that are CLEARLY written by AI. I can tell this because the AI responses seem to keep using the same or similar words that it believes would apply to journalists, or are how journalists speak, but as a real, human journalist for more than ten years, I know that journalists don’t actually speak like that.

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss some small changes, an AI song, and internet soup.

JOSEPH: We’re making a couple of changes that might sound boring to someone who doesn’t read or listen to our work, but I’m actually legit excited about them, and I think they will be better for all of you too. I’ll talk about one now and maybe the other next week.