A week in Generative AI: Tattoos, Reddit & Robots
News for the week ending 6th July 2025
With Independence Day in the US, and OpenAI giving all employees the week off this week (who haven’t had a week without news for a long time!), its been a very quiet week on the GenAI front. There have been a couple of interesting things that have piqued my interest though, which I’ve shared below.
Reddit turns 20, and it’s going big on AI
20 years of Reddit - who knew?! As the company celebrates its big birthday this week, it’s talking a lot about the AI tools that it’s developing like Reddit Answers. However, I’m more interested in it as a platform, especially since recent research from Profound confirmed something that many people already knew that has an unduly large influence on generative AI models.
According to the research, Reddit makes up 11.3% of citations from ChatGPT, 21% of citations from Gemini, and a whopping 46.7% of citations from Perplexity. That is a huge amount of influence over three of the most prominent generative AI platform, especially at a time when we’re starting to see accelerating mainstream adoption of them.
Anthropic’s Claude is notably absent from the research, as they’re currently being sued by Reddit for unlawfully access Reddit’s data without permission. Despite these bumps along the road, Reddit continues to be a great source of human data online - covering a diverse range of topics in depth and also giving insights into what’s culturally relevant at any given time.
Happy Birthday Reddit!
ChatGPT referrals to news sites are growing, but not enough to offset search declines
TL;DR - news-related prompts in ChatGPT have grown 2x over the last 12 months and referrals to news sites have grown 25x. That’s a lot of growth!
But because of the dominance of Google, which has recently been hit by an antitrust complaint over AIU Overviews in the EU, publishers are seeing over a 25% decline in traffic in the last 12 months. This is leading publishers to abandon the organic search optimisations they’ve been doing for over a decade as they just don’t have the impact that they used to have.
The online landscape is starting to change, and these changes are accelerating rapidly!
China hosts first fully autonomous AI robot football match
Well, of course I was going to feature this the second I saw it! It’s undeniably awful, and the robots are weirdly small. There’s also a comedy moment after 35 seconds where the ‘medics’ come on field to rescue a broken robot with a stretcher. This will have to get much, much better for it to be a compelling watch, but I’m glad someone is trying to do it! Given how quickly the technology is progressing, maybe something worth checking back in on in 5 years!
AI Ethics News
Number of new UK entry-level jobs has dived since ChatGPT launch
EU says it will continue rolling out AI legislation on schedule
The Club World Cup that wasn’t: how fake highlights took over the internet
Anthropic Let an AI Agent Run a Small Shop and the Result Was Unintentionally Hilarious
Long Reads
The Verge - This is not a tattoo robot
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“
William Gibson