Independent launches AI-created news briefings for ‘busy' readers
The Independent is launching a new fast news service that will harness artificial intelligence (AI) to create summarised versions of articles for people on the move.
The platform, called Bulletin, publishes bullet point briefings designed for 'seriously busy' audiences.
It will utilise Google Gemini, the search engine's AI chatbot, to produce content which will be reviewed and checked by journalists before being published.
The Independent said it was creating a series of new editorial jobs to oversee the service, which will be launched as a separate platform from March 31.
Editor-in-chief Geordie Greig said the newspaper was 'helping to pioneer what is a fact of life in 21st century information, the use of AI in journalism'.
Bulletin will allow it to 'cut to the chase' with news briefings that 'supplement' full-length content.
Readers will have the option to click through to in-depth news, podcasts, newsletters and documentaries, according to the publisher.
Christian Broughton, the Independent's chief executive, said its journalists 'wanted to ensure they are always in control of the process' while still meeting its audience's 'desire for trusted, essential briefings'.
'That need has become more acute, whether from long working hours, busy family life, or all kinds of other reasons,' he said.
But he stressed that its 'human team' will still be best placed to produce in-depth news and features.
Other major news outlets have started using AI to produce content in recent years.
Newsquest, which is behind dozens of regional newspapers including The Herald in Scotland, now employs AI-assisted reporters who use the technology to help write news articles.
Last year, the Financial Times launched its first generative AI tool for subscribers, allowing users to ask questions and receive a response using content published by the newspaper over the past two decades.
Meanwhile, AI has not always come without its issues. In January, Apple announced it had paused the use of its Apple Intelligence AI tools to create news summaries after a number of incidents where it created inaccurate headlines.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Missouri Attorney General threatens legal action against 18 hemp companies; more to come
(Rebecca Rivas/The Missouri Independent) Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has sent several cease-and-desist letters to companies selling a hemp product called THCA flower that looks exactly like marijuana flower sold at dispensaries. Bailey's letters threaten legal action, including injunctions, civil penalties and attorney's fees if the companies continue to sell the products. 'When purchasing products, Missourians deserve to know if they are being exposed to dangerous side effects like psychotic episodes, hallucinations or other life-threatening risks,' said Attorney General Bailey in a statement to The Independent. 'We have issued 18 cease and desist letters so far, and more are forthcoming.' Cannabis lobbyist Eapen Thampy said about a dozen smoke shops in St. Louis received the letters, and in some cases, THCA flower makes up 60% to 80% of the companies' inventories. Thampy said he's working with the companies to put together a response to the letters and preparing for potential litigation. The action is the first major move since Bailey created a new specialized unit last fall, with the aim to assist the state's alcohol and tobacco regulators in cracking down on intoxicating hemp products. In September, Bailey vowed his new unit would work with the Missouri Alcohol and Tobacco Control Division to bring legal action against licensees selling unregulated psychoactive cannabis products that violate the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act. 'The ATC will assist by making its investigators available as witnesses for legal proceedings resulting from actionable referrals,' Bailey said in September. 'Our enforcement toolkit will be robust from cease-and-desist letters and investigations to subpoenas and lawsuits to referrals for criminal prosecution where appropriate.' The letters that went out last month state that the companies are 'directed to cease and desist from selling' hemp products that contain more than 0.3% THCA on a dry weight basis. THCA is a naturally abundant cannabinoid that transforms into Delta-9 THC when smoked or heated. However, this is not what an official cease and desist order looks like, said Jefferson City-based attorney Chuck Hatfield. 'It is an informal cease and desist,' Hatfield said. 'It is not a letter that has the force and effect of law. It's more in the nature of a request to stop.' Under state law, if Bailey wanted to issue an official cease and desist order – as he did for Planned Parenthood in March – Hatfield said Bailey would have to issue a notice of intent first. The company would have the right to appeal through an administrative hearing, as well as challenge the order in court. 'But he hasn't done any of that,' Hatfield said. Bailey could also file a lawsuit under Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, and that doesn't require a cease and desist order, he said. Charles Alovisetti, a cannabis attorney with Vincente law firm in Boston, said the lack of a state law to support the action could put Bailey in a tricky spot. 'If the goal is to control THCA flower sales, states should regulate hemp products in their final form, including THCA flower, through clear legislation,' Alovisetti wrote in a LinkedIn post. 'Letters like this may not hold up in court.' For the third year in a row, state lawmakers failed to pass legislation to regulate intoxicating hemp products by the end of the session in May. At issue in Bailey's letters is THCA, which is not intoxicating in its natural state. Most marijuana flower found in dispensaries contains about 20-40% THCA, which would not get a person high if they consumed it without heating it. It has to be smoked to transform it into Delta-9 THC, which produces the desired high for consumers. The process of heating is called decarboxylation. Legal action against THCA hemp flower raises a dizzying debate about distinction between hemp and marijuana under federal law. Cannabis attorney Rod Kight, who has represented hemp businesses in lawsuits nationwide, said Bailey's letter accurately states that the sole distinction between legal hemp and illegal marijuana is the concentration of delta-9 THC, which cannot exceed 0.3% for hemp. The part Bailey gets wrong, Kight said, is claiming that THCA is part of the calculation for determining whether harvested hemp or a hemp product is lawful. 'Given that Missouri law does not address THCA at all, it is clear that the attorney general is relying on recent letters from the DEA in support of its position that the concentration of THCA must be taken into account when determining the legal status of harvested hemp and hemp products,' Kight said. However, he said the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's interpretation has caused a lot of confusion. 'Hemp growers must account for THCA before harvesting their hemp crops,' Kight said. 'Thereafter, the THCA concentration does not matter under federal law or the laws of Missouri and the 'post-decarboxylation' test does not apply to harvested hemp or hemp products sold by wholesalers or retailers.' Since the 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp, botanists have figured out how to breed cannabis plants capable of passing the only federal checkpoint required on hemp plants — a visit from U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors 30 days before harvest. At that point, the levels of Delta-9 THC and THCA are below the federal threshold, but both increase before being harvested 30 days later. Kight said he believes there's lots of marijuana flower sold in dispensaries that would probably meet this standard of hemp as well. It's a point that's being argued in court, he said. 'THCA is the most abundant cannabinoid that cannabis produces,' he said. 'If there's any cannabinoid that humans have truly ingested for thousands of years, it's THCA. The hemp industry is moving kind of back towards this more natural sort of state of affairs, and I'm very pleased with that.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Corporations are ditching rainbow flags and cutting funding for Pride. LGBT+ people say they won't forget it
Every June, like clockwork, multinational corporations — from banks to fashion houses to petrochemical giants — would suddenly don their Pride-themed logos on social media. Many LGBT+ people found it shallow, and mocked the phenomenon as a cynical exercise in "rainbow-washing". But just a few years since the wash of rainbow feeds, even this skin-deep show of support is conspicuous by its absence. Of the ten major U.S. corporations documented by journalist Hunter Schwarz to have adopted a Pride avatar or banner on Twitter in 2023 — including ExxonMobil, Bank of America, and Freddie Mac — just one, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, is still flying its rainbow flag on the social network today. Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League have also abandoned it since 2023. "A lot of people have hesitations around 'rainbow capitalism', and I'm definitely one of those people," Maybe Burke, a 32-year-old gender inclusion consultant in Philadelphia, tells The Independent. "But to not see anything makes you miss when you did, you know?" Multicolor logos aren't the only things disappearing. Pride marches across the nation have lost corporate sponsorships, from big city extravaganzas to small town celebrations. New York City's Pride organizers reportedly lost roughly one quarter of their corporate donors this year; Kansas City Pride lost half its annual budget; even San Francisco Pride was down $200,000. Some ties, such as that of Budweiser brewer Anheuser-Busch to St Louis PrideFest, were decades old. LGBT+ non-profits have also reported severe drops in their funding. The newsletter Popular Information found 19 examples of companies that appeared to have scaled back their support for Pride, including Dyson, Nivea, UPS, Mastercard, and Citi. The hardware chain Lowe's reportedly also backed out of a regular Human Rights Campaign survey and shut down an LGBT+ employee resource group. Another report by NBC News named Nissan, Comcast, and drinks maker Diegeo. "The scale of the retreat in the U.S. is dramatic and telling," Fabrice Houdart, executive director of the Association of LGBTQ+ Corporate Directors, tells The Independent. "We're not witnessing a mere dialing down — we're witnessing withdrawal, with a few exceptions... the exuberant displays of support we saw five years ago have been replaced by passivity, silence, or strategic invisibility." Burke, who earns much of her living training organizations to be more welcoming to trans and non-binary people, noticed conditions beginning to change after the Trump administration's flurry of executive orders targeting DEI programs — one of which threatened to investigate companies, non-profits, universities, and other institutions that maintain them. "No new inquiries were coming in, and people I had been planning and talking with for months were ghosting me," Burke says. "June has always been my busiest month of the year. June has funded the rest of my summer. In recent years I've had at least two gigs a week in June with different clients; as of right now, I have two gigs for the entire month.' One client, she adds, told her straight up that the company's legal department had intervened and warned that hiring her for a gig might violate Trump's decrees. That's just one symptom of the sudden chill that has descended over corporate America about openly standing up for LGBT+ rights. Some companies pulled back earlier, as a new anti-LGBT+ hate movement gathered steam between 2021 and 2024. But the presence of an openly authoritarian president in the White House, backed by a movement seemingly hellbent on driving queer people back underground, has drastically raised the stakes. "Companies are afraid of backlash, boycotts, and being 'called out' by the administration. But the real issue is that many never developed the courage of their convictions," says Houdart from the Association of LGBTQ+ Corporate Directors. "We're seeing the unraveling of conditional support: the second Pride stopped being universally popular or profitable, many brands quietly exited." Ron deHarte, co-president of the Pride organizers' association USA Prides, says there has indeed been a "noticeable decline" in national-level brand sponsorships, especially in the biggest advertising markets (mostly large cities such as New York and Los Angeles). Yet he stresses that there are other factors at play too. "The broader economic climate", he argues, especially "uncertainty around tariffs", is making companies reticent about spending on events and marketing across the board. Whatever the cause, the lost money will have an impact. Sponsorship money, deHarte explains, is "crucial not only for the flashy decorations and entertainment but also for essential aspects like security, insurance, porta-jons, and maintaining free entry for many events." At least smaller Pride events, which is most of them, will be less impacted on average, because they "traditionally rely more on community fundraising and local business support". Of the nine companies that ditched their Twitter drag since 2023, ExxonMobil, McKesson, Cencora, Cardinal health, Centene, Bank of America, Freddie Mac, and UPS, all either did not respond or declined to comment to The Independent. Citi did respond, though it declined to answer our specific questions. A spokesperson said the company's LGBT+ employee group is 'excited about sponsoring a range of Pride celebrations' worldwide, and will be marching with the LGBT+ elders' charity SAGE in New York City. To be fair, few companies seem to have completely cut all support, instead either scaling down their commitments or simply undertaking them more quietly. Yet that still sends a bitter message to a community that has spent decades fighting not to have to live in hiding. There is, after all, a reason that nobody dubs it LGBT+ Sensible Modesty Month. "In the short term, it's unpleasant. It reinforces the sense that LGBTQ+ dignity is still negotiable and that we never really accumulated any political or economic power," says Houdart. There will, he argues, be lasting damage to companies' reputation: "Many queer people will not forget who stood up and who disappeared." Yet in the long term, deHarte and Houdart are both hopeful that good things will come of this. To deHarte, it's an opportunity for the movement to diversify its funding and prioritize sponsors who demonstrate a real, year-round commitment to LGBT+ equality all year round "It could be a pivotal moment — a forced reckoning,' says Houdart. 'We have been too dependent on institutional validation from parties, governments, and corporations that never honestly shared our long-term vision. "This is a wake-up call to reclaim our power and stop renting our liberation from others... it's a painful moment, but it's also clarifying. Our future depends on solidarity and organizing, not sponsorship."
Tom's Guide
2 days ago
- Tom's Guide
AI on phones feels too much like homework — and Apple should use iOS 26's redesign to fix that
Tech companies, especially the ones that make and sell phones, have been telling us how important AI is for several years, and offering a range of new AI-powered features that promise to make our lives easier. But despite promising that, it seems a bunch of those companies forgot the most important thing about new features — making sure people can actually find and use them. As someone who's spent a great deal of time reviewing new phones, nothing irritates me more than being told about new AI features and then having to do a bunch of research to figure out how to access them. Even Apple, a company that has made its own AI suite a lot more transparent, is guilty of this in some regard. And since iOS 19 (or iOS 26) is set to redesign the entire Apple ecosystem, WWDC 2025 is a chance for the company to make AI feel less like homework and transform it into something a lot simpler and more intuitive. I'll preface this with an admission that not all AI features are difficult to find. If it involves going through some kind of voice assistant, like Google Gemini or Siri, then AI capabilities are literally only a voice prompt away. Similarly AI photo editing features, like Google's Magic Editor, have long been available in photo gallery apps, like Google Photos or Apple's equivalent. But at the same time, considering all these features have been around for quite some time, their location and functionality have already been ingrained into our collective memories. Plus, once you know about one of those features, you can often find similar ones in the same spot. Or in the case of voice assistants, physically ask it about the kind of things it can do. There's also a bunch of AI working in the background that the user doesn't actually need to initiate. All that processing that happens to your photos? AI has a hand there, just as it does in helping translate foreign languages for you. We've also seen AI applied to software that helps manage the battery and displays, to help phones run more smoothly and efficiently. None of this is the flashy AI that gets promoted in keynote speeches or TV commercials. It's the boring stuff that makes your phone run and perform better, without you even realizing what's going on. But if a company is trying to add some fuel to the AI hype train, the focus ends up on the new and showy AI features that look and sound good. The problem is phone makers haven't put much consideration into helping users find the darn things. One good example I've found in this area are specialist translation apps — ones that do more than Google Translate. Samsung's Interpreter Mode is the one I've noticed this with most recently, offering the ability to translate two-way conversations happening in two different languages. I know that it exists, Samsung has talked about it at great length, but looking at a Galaxy S25, it's nowhere to be seen. It's not in the app drawer, nor the home screen, nor is it one of the default apps in the Quick Settings menu. Instead you either have to use the search bar to find Interpreter Mode, or change the Quick Settings features to include it — which isn't ideal when you only have 6-8 slots to choose from. The more I think about Galaxy AI features Samsung has talked about, the more I realize that I also have no idea where they are. The same is true for Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini and the countless other AI features that have been added to smartphones in recent years. I made a point of criticizing this in my review of the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, but the problem is a lot more widespread than that — and it's like phone makers don't realize this is a complete hindrance. In the days when new AI features weren't all that common, this probably wouldn't be so bad. Users get the time to get to grips with new features as they arrive, and by the time the next big software update comes around it'll be second nature. But the sheer number of new AI features being added to phones, and with little communication on how they work, makes this much more difficult. The distinct lack of official guidance on how to use new AI features is definitely getting in the way of me wanting to use them — and I doubt I'm the only one who feels that way. If phone makers really care about us using AI features more regularly, then this needs to change. I've often spoken about my severe lack of interest when it comes to using AI on phones, and a big part of that is due to the fact it's usually so difficult to find any of the new features. Back in the day, Apple would proudly declare that "it just works," with die-hard fans parroting that line for several years. But when your new smartphone comes with homework, it certainly isn't passing the intuitiveness test with a particularly good grade. Apple's not the only party guilty of this, but with WWDC set to majorly shake up how Apple software works, be it on iPhone, Mac or another Apple product, it's in a position to try and help users use Apple Intelligence without doing a thesis-load of research first. Who knows, maybe making AI actually intuitive can help make up for all its AI missteps over the past year.
