AI-run news sites are starting to beat human reporters on speed

In short: AI-run news sites are getting fast enough to publish breaking stories before human reporters.

What's going on

An AI-focused news site called RuntimeWire published a story about OpenAI and a hacking incident more than three hours before WIRED did, even though RuntimeWire had no reporter at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

RuntimeWire is run by entrepreneur Ryan Merket. He said he saw a post about the OpenAI talk on X, then used a transcript of the talk to generate an article while the session was still happening. He said the article took about six minutes to publish after he sent the transcript to his AI tools.

Merket says his system does more than write. It also looks for story ideas, edits drafts, checks facts, creates images, translates stories, and turns some stories into podcasts and videos using artificial voices. RuntimeWire has published nearly 2,000 stories since May, and Merket says it costs about $100 a day to run.

Another example is The Dissent, an “agentic newsroom” run by Dakota Carrasco. He uses several AI-made reporter personas, like characters in a writer’s room, and runs a local San Francisco site for under $1,000 a month.

What to watch

Speed can help readers learn about events quickly, but it also raises risks. These operators are trusting software to judge what is true and what could lead to legal trouble. A Northwestern University professor cited in the report also found that chatbots sometimes pull information from AI-written articles, which could create a loop where machines increasingly cite other machines.

Source: Wired