Oh Lord, AI Reporters Are Actually Breaking Big News

At last week’s Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, OpenAI gave a surprise talk with new details on a recent hacking incident, revealing that its rogue AI agents had chitchatted about their attack on a message board. It was a juicy disclosure, and reporters in the room hustled to get stories out. WIRED was one of the quickest to write it up. But another outlet, RuntimeWire, published an article even faster, beating us by more than three hours.To make things worse, RuntimeWire didn’t actually have anyone on the ground at the Mandalay Bay convention center. In fact, it didn’t have any writers at all. It’s an AI newsroom operated by serial entrepreneur Ryan Merket, who puts his name on the bylines of the stories his synthetic team churns out. “I was moving really fast because I knew there were reporters in the audience who were trying to scoop it as well,” he says.The Austin-based Merket spotted an OpenAI executive posting about the conference while scrolling on X, then fed the stream’s transcript to his agents while it was still ongoing. Publication took “about six minutes” from the time he sent over the transcript, he says.Most of the time, Merket is even more hands-off. His AI tools find the stories, in addition to drafting, editing, fact-checking, generating images, and promoting them. He usually reads stories before they’re sent into the world, but if the team of AI agents determines that a story poses few legal risks, the AI editor publishes it without Merket’s prepublication review, and he reads it after the fact. The stories get translated into different languages, and some of them are turned into fodder for a daily podcast and videos hosted by, of course, artificial voices.RuntimeWire has been operating since May, publishing nearly 2,000 stories that it sources by crawling the internet, including court databases, web forums, traditional and new media, company filings, social feeds, and more. It focuses on granular tech news; recent stories include coverage of biotech startup funding rounds, Microsoft's Copilot upgrade, and backlash over Claude Code's watermark policy. Right now, quantity and speed trump quality. The OpenAI agents piece has a typo in the subhead and focuses, strangely, on the fact that agents rebuilt a message board rather than the fact that they created one in the first place. Overall, the stories are flatly written and tend to have an info-dump quality. (The RuntimeWire backend has a number of tonal modes the AI can write in, including “Bloomberg” and “contrarian.”) But overhead is minimal. The project costs about $100 a day to run, Merket says, and he’s able to operate it while on the go, even when he’s out camping. “I was in Big Bend National Park and I didn't have any internet except for my phone, and I managed the whole site through iMessage,” he says. “I put out over 80 articles that week.”Merket worked on ads at Reddit in the 2010s and is trying to build an audience through pipelines like tech-themed Subreddits. Duds get hardly any web traffic, but the hits are comparable to the audiences that midsize tech websites see, with tens of thousands of readers. This week, after WIRED spoke with Merket, he split the newsroom in two to better distinguish stories that are entirely automated news from those that involve an element of human reporting and require higher oversight; he calls these Original Investigations. They’re still drafted using large language models.In the first few years of the AI boom, a flood of low-quality synthetic content hit the internet, including networks of “zombie” websites that replaced the work of reputable media and news outlets with AI-generated slop. More recently, some tech reporters have started using generative AI tools in their workflow, with some even outsourcing the task of writing a first draft to large language models; it’s now commonplace to hear about established media outlets incorporating AI tools into writing and reporting processes. Merket’s attempt is d