By Ernie Smith
Publication Date: 2025-12-10 18:53:00
When it comes to new AI technologies like large language models and agent coding, I’ve traditionally fallen somewhere in the middle on the spectrum of fan to skeptic to hater – I’m intrigued by the potential technical benefits, but often feel like they’re gushing and overemphasized.
(The metaphor I’m relying on should sound familiar to any newspaper designer: like Photoshop, it’s a useful tool that’s all too easy to abuse. Avoid the default filters.)
My optimism was cautious at best. I was rewarded for this cautious optimism when my entire archive appeared to be stolen for a fake Wikipedia.
This fall, I noticed that Elon Musk’s Grok had taken over the archives of my newsletter Tedium – my life’s work, for better or worse – and turned them into hundreds of AI-generated entries on Grokipedia. Many of these entries cited Tedium posts not once but more than 40 times, seemingly restating concepts line by line. (What’s even worse is that the site is designed in such a way that…
