Hello. My name is... Well, that's not really important now. But during a good part of the George "Dubyuh" Bush administration... Well, there wasn't really a "good" part. Anyway, during that time, I wrote and produced The Specious Report.
One of my rare straightforward essays at the time was entitled "Life Imitates Satire: Sometimes Reality Has the Last Laugh" which chronicled an amusing number of spoof news stories than had appeared in the internet's overabundance of satire websites and which had actually come to pass. I compared the phenomenon to a classic episode of the original Twilight Zone featuring Burgess Meredith as a sinister typesetter who rescues a struggling newspaper by reporting events before they happen.
What's the point? Only that one of my spoofs from 2002 announced:
The staff of The Specious Report is taking a well-deserved vacation. But while we're away, LaffMaster 1.0, a new and revolutionary CAS (Comedy Automation Software) will keep the site updated with the very best in political satire and pop culture parody. We hope you continue to enjoy reading The Specious Report, and we wish you a safe and happy holiday season.
Well guess what...
Welcome to The Specious Report: Version 2.0 where the articles and images are indeed generated 100% by Artificial Intelligence. With the exception of this "About" page (which I wrote - and I'm almost certain that I'm human) every work of satire has been written by algorithms somewhere in The Cloud. I might occasionally change a word here and there (for legal reasons, etc.). But otherwise, a few precision suggestions entered into a prompt field does all the work. And in many cases I only need to type a headline. Sometimes the articles are funny. Other times not so much. And sometimes the results are surprisingly on target.
The same goes for images accompanying the articles. Oh, you might spot a sixth finger or a third leg here and there. And the robot artists haven't yet mastered lettering. But I believe we're in the "golden age" of AI and I'll be a little sad when all the glitches are ironed out.
The technology is at once amusing, amazing and scary. But so are the times we live in, where it's too often hard to distinguish real news from satire from malicious disinformation. Once again my essay comes to mind with its ominous conclusion: "So let this serve as a warning to the infinite number of monkeys with typewriters out there: Be careful what preposterous headline you invent today. It just might end up being tomorrow's front page news."
A warning indeed. For better or worse, AI is now an irreversible part of our daily lives. So I sincerely hope you enjoy reading TSRv2.0. That is, until we willingly surrender to our robot masters...
— thespeciousreport [@gmail.com]