Oh Lord, AI Reporters Are Actually Breaking Big News
Last week, an AI newsroom beat mainstream journalists—including WIRED—to a story about OpenAI and hacking. It’s just the beginning.
RuntimeWire, operated by entrepreneur Ryan Merket, is a synthetic AI newsroom that publishes nearly 2,000 stories each month. The Austin-based operation crawls the internet for tech news and sources by feeding OpenAI executive transcripts into its AI agents. The stories are then drafted, edited, fact-checked, and even translated into different languages.
However, most of the work is automated, with Merket occasionally reviewing the final product. The AI newsroom has minimal overhead costs, running about $100 a day. Merket's attempt is different from previous low-quality synthetic content, as he aims to break news and repurpose established outlets' content. This has even gained traction among some tech reporters who have started using generative AI tools in their workflow.
Despite the risks of trusting machines to determine what's true and newsworthy, Merket's operation has already seen some success, with a childhood friend sharing a RuntimeWire story on social media.
Written by urgent.news from Wired's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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