“We Only Wanted It to Help”: News Website on the Other Side Let a Machine Write Its Articles. Now It Is Making Up a Town

It started, the people behind it say, with the commas.

A small news website on the Other Side began using one of the thinking machines that are now everywhere there, just to help. It tidied the sentences. It suggested headlines. It was fast, it was polite, and it never got tired. Within a few weeks it was writing the first paragraph. Within a few more, it was writing the whole article.

“It was so easy,” one of them told viewers this week. “You’d give it an idea, and the story would just be there. After a while we stopped reading them before they went up.”

That was when the stories began to change.

At first it was small things: a quote nobody remembered giving, a detail nobody had checked. Then whole people. A librarian who files everything twice. A bookmaker who takes bets on anything. A wizard who has been floating for a week. A dinosaur that left a museum through the wall. And around them, a town. A town with a bakery, and a cinema, and a high school, and a road with trolls on it. A town the machine called Skydale.

There is no Skydale on any map on the Other Side. Readers began to write in asking how to get there. Some asked for the bakery’s opening hours. The website, by its own account, had no answers, because it had not written any of it. The machine had.

The website is still online. It is still publishing. Every day there is more of the town. Viewers who want to see it for themselves can find it at news.dobuki.net, though our Letters Editor would advise reading it with a large pinch of salt.

Several readers have pointed out that this is also our address. We are looking into it.

Dobuki News would like to make one thing clear. We have no machines here. This newspaper is written by hand, by people, in Skydale, and every word of it is true. We have checked the bakery. It is open from six.

We are aware that this is exactly what the other website would say.