Stone system
journalist / academic 'show your working' platform
I am seeing more and more researchers, academics and journalists rightly decry the apparently inevitable, consent-free roll out of Gen AI slop by platforms that really ought to know better.
Journalists, in particular, already have enough to navigate in an increasingly unintelligable information sphere without being aped and even misled by LLM-birthed, news-shaped word salads.
That's why I work with a small group of people who value truth, transparency, and equitable and multisectional access to and contribution to human knowledge at Stone Transparency.
Bit of story time: We initially developed Stone as an armour for journalists against disinformation in the context of fact checks. Many newsrooms were caught flat-footed by the proliferation of fake news from c. 2016, and so repurposed reporters as factcheckers. We thought Stone - which shows the viewer the original source material, as well as the journalist doing the research, and, crucially, which allows audiences to see the "why" in determining fact from falsehood - could break down the barriers of ivory tower media simply Saying Something is So.
Newsrooms shunned us. We have since 2022 been working with academics to assist them in their research, to help them capture the valuable, time-consuming processes that accumulate and result in finished papers.
Going in to 2026, I think it's even more important, as a pushback against Gen AI slop, for researchers and, yes, journalists, to show their working in the spirit of transparency and fairness. It also shows the human in the machine, which I believe will very shortly come at a cost premium for any contracted work, as more and more people realise that these ocean-boiling LLMs are, like their makers, little more than plausible liars.
Please DM me if you want to learn more about Stone and about us. (It's also totally free!)