CEO Ben Collins explains why The Onion is ‚fervently and hardcore against AI in every way.‘
AI may threaten a wide variety of jobs in journalism (among a great many other professions), but the CEO of The Onion showed up at a journalism conference here to declare that it can’t menace the livelihoods of humor writers, because it’s awful at that work.
„It’s like the least fucking funny technology that exists“, Ben Collins said in an onstage interview at this week’s Online News Association’s conference. The best-case outcome for asking ChatGPT to write a joke? „You may get an eye-roll.“
He expanded on that critique later on in his hour-long conversation with Niketa Patel, ONA’s CEO and executive director. „AI is like the synthesis of all known stuff on the internet“, Collins said. „It picks the middle of it. And jokes are never the middle of anything.“
So, The Onion’s satirical words and images remain human-crafted. Said Collins, „We’re just fervently and hardcore against AI in every way.“
„CEO“ is a relatively new job title for Collins, who spent years at NBC News documenting how social platforms let misinformation run rampant and was starting to get ground down by that work. „The kind of stuff that happened yesterday was my whole job“, he said, alluding to the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. „There’s only so many times you can watch this stuff.“
Collins recalled his thoughts on learning in early 2024 of plans to sell The Onion by its parent firm, G/O Media, a private holding company with a history of dismantling sites for short-term profit: „This is going to go into the hands of somebody who was going to ruin this thing for political purposes.
