Most of us by now have become more or less desensitized to a steady drip of AI slop: AI-generated influencers, musicians racking up millions of streams, LinkedIn posts\u2014a sizable chunk of online content is now being churned out by bots, without any kind of federal regulation to keep it in check.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even the news is becoming automated: As Wired reported<\/a> Wednesday, an AI-driven publication called RuntimeWire was the first to publish a major scoop about the recent hack into Hugging Face<\/a> by rogue OpenAI models, beating actual tech publications to the punch by a significant margin. <\/p>\n That obviously raises big questions around the future of journalism at a time when the industry is already struggling to contend with the rise of AI chatbots and their siphoning of traffic from traditional online search, which has long served as the backbone of digital publishing.<\/p>\n The theory behind RuntimeWire <\/p>\n Much of the job of human reporters is pattern-recognition: spotting trends and connecting dots quicker than your competitors. That means that LLMs, with their superhuman ability to detect signals from oceans of noisy data, are at least theoretically well-positioned to spot story ideas that might elude human journalists. (An algorithm can scrutinize a companies\u2019 tax records much more meticulously and quickly than a human can, for example.)<\/p>\n That\u2019s the idea behind RuntimeWire, \u201can AI-native startup news and intelligence publication built for founders, operators, investors, and engineers,\u201d according to its LinkedIn page<\/a>. Launched in May by Austin-based entrepreneur and tech investor Ryan Merket, RuntimeWire is positioned as a new kind of newsroom that blends the speed of AI with at least some degree of human editorial oversight. Think of it like informational fast food: speediness at the expense of quality.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are a lean team covering a beat that used to take a much larger one, so we lean hard on modern tools\u2014including AI\u2014to move faster,\u201d the company wrote<\/a> in the \u201cEthics\u201d section of its website, adding that it \u201cuses AI to monitor sources, surface what is genuinely new across thousands of feeds, transcribe, summarize long documents, and handle the grunt work of research\u2026 But the pipeline starts and ends with people.\u201d The site also includes AI-generated header images for stories, as well as a \u201cDaily Recap\u201d podcast with automated hosts. RuntimeWire is currently hiring for a contract-based \u201cStartup News Writer\u201d position, according to its website. One of the listed requirements says that applicants must be \u201ccomfortable being assisted by AI tools.\u201d<\/p>\n