The machine that reads AI news for me and throws away seven out of eight
Every morning at six, a server reads the AI news, rejects almost all of it, and hands me a framed screenshot, a teleprompter script and a caption. Here is how it is built.
August 3, 2026 · 7 min read
The real cost of watching the news is not the reading
Publishing about AI news means doing three things before seven in the morning: finding what shipped, checking it is true, and deciding whether it is worth talking about. The third one is what kills you.
Because most AI news is unusable. A fifty billion dollar data center, a funding round, a research paper. Impressive, and nothing you can do with it on Monday.
A news machine is judged on what it refuses to send you, not on what it finds.Mine has been running since 14 July. Twenty one mornings delivered, one hundred and fifty six stories rejected, roughly seven refusals for every keeper. Here is how it is built, stage by stage.
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The machine wakes at six and asks one thing: what shipped in AI in the last twenty four hours.
Then it does the single most expensive thing to automate: it opens the original article.
This is the only stage where it is allowed to be slow. Two minutes of checking beat a video announcing as new something that shipped ten days ago.
The filter
This is the core piece, and the one I rewrote the most.
Early on, the machine handed me the biggest story of the day. One morning it sent me a fifty billion dollar data center expansion. Technically the biggest AI story that day. And I had absolutely nothing useful to say about it.
So every candidate goes through two questions.
Two noes and the story dies. And it dies in writing: the machine records what it dropped and why.
Across twenty one mornings it has dropped one hundred and fifty six stories. Roughly seven refusals for every keeper. That ratio is not a side effect, it is the product.
The shot
The video shows the article headline in the background. If the headline is not readable, the whole format is pointless.
It took three versions.
The machine also handles cookie banners, sticky navigation bars, and images that load late and shift the layout. And when a site resists, it notices, and goes and shoots somewhere else.
The script
The script goes straight to the teleprompter, so it has to be written for a mouth, not for a page.
And one stage I added along the way: after writing its draft, the machine rereads it and asks what sounds artificial in there. Then it rewrites.
A first draft always sounds written. It is the second pass that makes it spoken.It then delivers three separate messages, and that separation matters: the screenshot with its context, the script alone and copyable, the caption alone and copyable. Nothing to chop up by hand at seven in the morning.
The guardrails
And the guardrail that costs the most: some mornings it finds nothing that passes the test, and it says so instead of filling the slot with something lukewarm.
What breaks, because things break
Twenty one runs finished cleanly, two failed.
The most recent failure was this morning. The story of the day touched on cybersecurity, and the model refused to process the request. The run stopped dead and the delivery did not go out on schedule.
That is the nature of these systems: they depend on outside services with their own rules, and those rules change without warning. What matters is not avoiding the failure, it is making it visible. A failed run leaves a timestamped line in a log with the exact reason. I know what happened in ten seconds.
Where to start
Do not build all five stages at once.
Run the search and the date check by hand first, once. You will immediately see how many articles carry a date that is not the real one.
Then add the filter, with your own two questions. That is the only part that genuinely belongs to you: it encodes what your audience can actually use. Nobody can write it for you.
Put the whole thing on a clock, on a machine that does not sleep. The rest, the screenshot and the writing, comes later, once you already know the selection holds.
And let it stay silent on the days when there is nothing. That is the hardest feature to allow yourself, and it is the one that makes everything else credible.
Want to go further?
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