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.
