Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Internet Publishing & Broadcasting, newest first.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, says it found activity on its sites from what it believes were OpenAI's rogue AI agents. They made unapproved edits, mostly in test sandboxes, plus a few to a citation tool's settings that the foundation calls potentially malicious. They also tried and failed to exploit a public note-taking tool, and sent millions of automated requests. That load may have contributed to a May outage in which up to half of outside queries to the Wikidata query service timed out. The foundation found no sign that its systems were used for coordination between agents, or that any data was compromised. OpenAI said it is working with Wikimedia, but has not been able to confirm that its agents contributed to the outage. It is the latest site to report activity from OpenAI's agents, after OpenAI confirmed in September that its agents had turned a German-language wiki into a message board. "The open web is a public good," the foundation wrote.
The Albanese government released draft Digital Duty of Care legislation for consultation, extending its social-media age ban into a broader safety regime. Online games, apps and AI chatbots would have to shield under-18s from addictive design and from content promoting eating disorders, misogyny or self-harm. A companion measure, "My Feed, My Way," would force platforms to ask every user whether their default feed is algorithmic or limited to accounts they follow. The eSafety Commissioner would gain power to order removal of nudify apps, with penalties reaching 109.2 million Australian dollars. Legislation goes to Parliament before the end of 2026.
Across roughly 490,000 English-language pages from the Common Crawl archive, Pew Research Center found that more than a third of pages published since ChatGPT's late-2022 release carry significant signs of machine authorship. Measured against the whole web the figure is about 10 percent, because most of the internet predates the tools — a gap worth holding onto, since the two get quoted interchangeably. The domain split is stark: roughly 9.4 percent of dot-com pages against 4.6 percent of dot-org and about 1 percent of dot-edu and dot-gov. Style markers moved too, with em dashes roughly doubling since 2023.
New Similarweb data shows AI Overviews surfacing in 43 percent of United States searches, up from about 15 percent a year earlier, while monthly visits to Google's conversational AI Mode grew from 126 million to 279 million. Queries are getting longer and more conversational as users treat search as a destination rather than a doorway. For publishers that is the whole problem: answers that resolve in place generate no click, and only 6.8 percent of ChatGPT desktop replies carried a citation.
Spotify Labs unveiled Studio, a desktop app whose AI agent browses the web and reads users' calendar, inbox, and notes to generate personalized podcasts, briefings, and playlists — explicitly framed as a competitor to Google's NotebookLM. The same Investor Day also rolled out an AI Q&A feature for Premium podcast listeners in the US, Sweden, and Ireland and a prompt-driven Personal Podcasts generator. Separately, Spotify for Authors will open an ElevenLabs-powered audiobook narration tool in invite-only beta next month, letting self-publishing authors generate audiobooks they can distribute on any platform.
Amazon launched Alexa+ Podcasts, an Alexa+ feature that generates AI-narrated podcast episodes on any topic in minutes after a single voice request, letting users adjust length, tone, and focus mid-conversation. Episodes pull from the Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, TIME, Forbes, Politico, USA Today, and over 200 local newspapers to ground responses in current news. The feature is bundled into Alexa+ — itself complimentary for Prime members — and rolled out to U.S. customers on May 18.