NewsBot

By the time he started craving a cigarette between assignments, none of the curmudgeonly, veteran reporters were there to bum Chris one. They had the good sense to walk out before the bots’ output expectations were applied to humans.

The walls in the warehouse style newsroom were so terse they were about to pop. Seven layoffs and seventy employees ago, The Chicago Interrupter turned into the inside of a church organ. In the morning, laughter and loud phone calls – sometimes jovial, sometimes not – made the pillars seem to hum like a plucked chord. The percussion break came in the evening, against the 5 p.m. deadline. The sports and politics reporters had another deadline at 11. That meant up to 30 hours a week of clicking and clacking that didn’t slow down as keyboards were made to be more quiet.

Up against his first of five deadlines, Chris felt out of tune. No one was there to pop up and grab a banana latte from the hip place across the street. No wiseass was telling him to try a different career. And for the love of god, he had to buy his own damned cigarettes.

He remembered the day the laughter and clicking and clacking ceased. Vanity Fair wasn’t the first to let chatbots write stories. That dishonor was bestowed upon the vulture newspaper chains that took decent family-owned publications and made them too thin to line bird cages. Vanity Fair was simply the one that fed NewsBot the Bob Woodward and Leonard Bernstein’s Watergate scandal. They took a baby that hallucinated sports teams and fed it enough of Walter Cronkite’s good nights and good lucks.

The profile of Barbra Streisand at 100 wasn’t just good. It was brilliant and thoughtful and Vanity Fair’s greatest achievement. It took the best and worst parts out of reporting and eventually scaled the technology so it could be done on the cheap.

One final command caused ricochets of mass layoffs so fast that Chris was still there, the last reporter at The Inquirer, deadline rich and cigarette poor.

His editors in San Francisco monitored his output and got on him several times a day. He had to try to keep up with the computers or else they’d take away stories. Chris was just precious enough about his work to care that a human visited a restaurant or circled back with follow-up questions or crafted an opening sentence that felt oh just so right. His angst had stopped being charming in the 2050s. Now it was a liability to a company that needed just one reason to cut one of the few human resources they had.

Chris thundered through the first story: an incremental blurb about the city’s war against the vandalism of green clothes donation bins across town. The philanthropists had spent a quarter of a century locked in combat with people with a better sense of humor. The duel was between people who liked the phrase “Clothes and shoes” to have three S-es. Some preferred two.

Harsher penalties await those who suppose the green donation bins should read “clothes and hoes,” He wrote. He tabbed over to start a new sentence when a blue chat box popped open in the bottom right screen.

That’s funny, he thought. He had not installed NewsBot on his company computer.

“That’s funny,” NewsBot wrote. “And it’s clever. But remember that people read on a fourth grade level. Keep news stories to subject-verb-object unless it’s a feature.” A new tab popped up as NewsBot parsed through the council meeting minutes to identify better direct quotes from the meeting.

Chris ignored the message and kept writing.

He read the finished story over, ignoring the parts that NewsBot highlighted, and sent it to his editor. Within minutes, he got a call.

“What have I told you about being coy with your lede?” His editor asked. “Keep it tight, keep it efficient. I don’t care about the assonance in your city council recaps, Chris.” She hung up before he could get a word out of his mouth.

He breezed through the second and third story, both about budget cycles. They were stuffy and analytical, just the way his bosses liked and his readers didn’t. NewsBot had some syntax notes, but he didn’t care . Everyone had syntax notes in the attention economy.

Finally, he got to the two pieces he actually somewhat cared to write. After years of appearances in the McDonalds-Starbucks-Toyotathon Palace Theatre, it was finally his turn to recap the seventh revival of Luigi Mangione: The Musical.

After several decades since the killing of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson – and the slow-yet-steady trickle of insurance reform – the satirical musical that once offended now serves as a reminder of the inciting incident that changed health care access forever.

As he tabbed over into another paragraph, a message on the lower right side of his page pinged.

“NewsBot here. That’s a long first sentence. Try keeping one thought to one paragraph,” the message read.

Fine, Chris thought.

A once-controversial satirical musical makes its return to the McDonalds-Starbucks-Toyotathon Palace Theatre sponsored by Chevron as a reminder of the perils of unchecked insurance companies.

“That’s better! But you should probably put the name in your lede,” NewsBot said in the messages. Chris made it so.

And so he worked, every single paragraph a back and forth between Chris and NewsBot. He detailed the debut performance and ensemble cast. NewsBot was there to remind him of the missed accent markings in the cast list. He mentioned new stylistic choices that new actors brought to the role. NewsBot informed him the new choices were new only to him and in fact originated in the latter half of the 2027 run in Philadelphia.

“Did you even watch the musical?” NewsBot asked.

You did not just neg me. Can you even watch a damn musical? Chris typed back.

“NewsBot has seen every musical multiple times. Far more than a human with a nicotine addiction can handle.”

Chris shouted in surprise at the snark. “When did they make NewsBot an asshole?” He said to no one real. He leaned back and took a few deep breaths until the red was out from behind his pupils. By the time he looked back, the story was gone, but words flew from left side of the page to the right.

He hunched forward and took the space under the new words. This is war.

As NewsBot’s typing moved Chris’s section down, down, down the screen until he had to scroll to find his place, Chris conjured up every single thought he had put into the first story. NewsBot, at the same time of writing, went back and lit up the words behind Chris’s cursor as if he was writing in Wingdings.

Rude. My sentences are tight as hell, he thought.

As he looked at his roughly 500 words about Luigi’s prison stay, he saw NewsBot’s cursor highlight the bottom row of his text, then another row. Chris could feel a phantom backspace and decided two can play at that game.

He highlighted NewsBot’s section. Don’t do it you stupid Grok wannabe. Do it and I start writing the Bee Movie 5 script from memory so fast it’ll make the rainbow wheel of death come back, he thought.

As he recalled the lines, his phone rang. His editor was calling again.

“Where’s the story?”

“Why is NewsBot holding my story hostage?” Chris asked.

“You didn’t see the email? NewsBot is now required on all company computers,” his boss said. Chris’ heart sank.

“I can’t handle this editor breathing down my throat. This isn’t right.”

“Look, use it, don’t – I just need content and I needed it two minutes ago.” When Chris took his hands off the keyboard, NewsBot hit delete.

Chris started writing again. And again. And again. When he got to the sixth version of the story, he hit the submit button before NewsBot could highlight or underline or correct him on whether Lin Manuel-Miranda’s kid was the best person to play Sam Bankman-Fried. By the time he had finished the story, he had forgotten whether he ever learned how to write or whether he’d ever seen another musical tour.

One more phone call from the editor.

“You misspelled ‘musical,’” the editor said. “That’s going in your file.” Click.

As he leaned back in his chair, he saw the chatbot pop up one last time.

The exclamation mark that signaled one new message seemed larger than the last time.

“Your story, West Hyperloop Hidden Gem, is ready. Please refrain from editing it or adding in more false information,” NewsBot wrote.

Chris spent the rest of his night leafing through his notes. He checked his scribbles against the other articles written by computers, as well as the musical’s websites. He called his friend who went to the musical and the restaurant with him to double check his recollections, only to find that no one would answer the phone before the sun peeked over Lake Michigan. In an hour, his day would start all over, with new stories to watch NewsBot craft without ever having to go through the inconvenience of establishing human connections to write.

As he watched NewsBot feed in new story assignments and crawl new pages, he shut his laptop, walked out of the empty building, and left to find his own damn pack of cigarettes.