The FT has shut AI out of its newsroom. So we ran one of its flagship features through ours

The Financial Times has doubled down. Under chief executive Jon Slade and editor Roula Khalaf, AI is being kept out of the newsroom. Not just out of the writing: there is to be no AI checking copy before it is published, and certainly none going off to find the data. I think that is a mistake. [S28, S52--S53]

It is also great fun to watch, and a little sad. This is the paper that helped invent the FTSE 100. In January 1984 it launched the index with the London Stock Exchange, replacing a figure worked out once a day with one that moved as the market did. It did not report on the new instrument. It built it. [S54--S55]

Four decades on, the same organisation has looked at the most powerful research instrument to arrive in a generation and decided it would rather not. The group will happily offer readers a generative AI product, Ask FT. The machine may serve the customers. It may not check the copy. Meanwhile the weekend paper grows ever more handsome, well travelled and pleased with itself, and it is becoming hard to tell where the FT ends and Monocle begins. [S35]