I was taken in by a fake AI news site. I think it may be an attempt to poison LLMs with propaganda.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Subscribe
Writing at the intersection of technology, journalism, and community.
- Generator
- Ghost 6.57
- Public lists
-
IndieWeb
- Fetched
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
AI's costs are going through the roof - so businesses are telling LLMs to talk like cavemen
Me think this hilarious sign of times.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
They tell us surveillance makes us safer. It undermines our democratic rights.
Civil society actors in nearly every region of the world now operate under the assumption that they are being surveilled. The result is a less democratic world for everyone.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
A concrete tool to help newsrooms cover emergencies
A new site to help newsrooms cover disasters is refreshing in its concrete practicality. Wouldn't it be great if these existed for every aspect of running a newsroom?
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Community Survey 2026
How can I serve you over the coming year?
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
A right-wing media chain tried to replace 47 newspapers with AI. They all died.
A right-wing media chain bought local papers, replaced their journalists with AI, and died. Now their communities are left to plug the gaps.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Two posts about writing
Ideas that spoke to me
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Are frontier models really too dangerous?
To an increasingly authoritarian regime, the opportunity to shape how models describe the world may be too good to pass up on.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Notable links: June 26, 2026
To meet your community where it's at, you need to empower your people.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
All you need to poison an LLM is 13 words.
"It really is just that simple. The way that you can attack these systems is usually so much dumber than you think it is, or than you think it needs to be."
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
To build resilient organizations, you need to empower your team to make decisions.
"That is not leadership. That is control. And it creates dependency, not growth."
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself.
"In philosophy, we have a term for this: a logical fallacy. And right now, journalism is full of them."
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Signs you're a dangerous terrorist: using Signal, moving zines
The unusually long sentences criminalize being an anti-fascist activist, reading the wrong zines, and using the wrong communication apps. They're incredibly dangerous.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Notable links: June 19, 2026
Preparing for the fastest period of technical change in decades.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The European Commission falls for openness theater by working with W Social
The European Commission has moved its profiles to W Social. That's a terrible decision.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
More people get their news from social media than anywhere else - globally. The platforms we use matter.
"For the first time, social media and video networks are, on average across the markets covered, more popular than both TV and owned news websites and apps as sources of news."
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
By the pricking of my corpus, something wicked answers for us
For years, people have used social media to seed disinformation in order to swing elections. Now, the answers our search engines and expert systems produce have become more vulnerable.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The honest truth about leaders who want to replace their workers with AI
"The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?” This is a bad CEO."
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
To build the future, we need theories of change
News tends to treat technology as something that happens to it, like an asteroid. To better navigate the future, we need to imagine what might come next.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
It's not enough to have better ideals.
You also need to build a better product.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The community-first software era
Some ideas about how to encode our values into the tools we use
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Notable links: May 29, 2026
On sustainably building tech that serves humanity.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
"The protocol world has been trying to solve the problem of how to leave, and the next step is working on how we can stay together."
It's not enough to be free. We also need to be in community
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
To reach your big goal, you need to sell where you're heading next
"You need to sell Point C: the concrete, vivid destination you will take yourself, your team, and your company to over the next twelve to twenty-four months."
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The Fediverse is not a product. It's time to get real about marketing
If projects are going to convince people to try alternatives to Big Tech, they need to do a much better job of explaining why they're better for people who don't care about technical details like protocols and decentralization.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
When the AI boom subsides, the data centers will remain. What we do now matters
Data centers are the new factories. How we think about the precedents they set matters.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The Pope used his first encyclical to warn about tech centralization
"When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, [giving] rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities."
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Affordances for me, but not for thee
For years, people have tried hard to get websites to build accessibility affordances. Now developers are willingly building them for AI.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Like sunrise over a sink
It appears that the winner of a short story prize was generated with AI. But how was it selected?
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Why micropayments can't save news
Why an ephemeral model can't fund relationship-based work