News by Humans! Why all news outlets today are AI slop
Posted on January 09, 2026 by Justin — 3 min
Why AI Shouldn’t Be in the News Today
Let me start with a strange confession: AI is one of the most important technologies of our time… and that’s exactly why it shouldn’t be in the news today.
Not because it doesn’t matter. But because when something appears in the news every single day, it stops informing us—and starts numbing us.
Right now, AI headlines are everywhere. AI will replace your job. AI will save medicine. AI will destroy democracy. AI will write this sentence better than I can.
And after a while, our brains do what they always do with noise: they tune it out.
Meanwhile, outside this room, very human problems are unfolding in real time.
People are making decisions—about war, about healthcare, about housing, about who gets help and who doesn’t. These decisions are not made by algorithms. They’re made by people.
But when AI dominates the news, something subtle happens. Responsibility gets blurred.
We start asking, “What will AI do?” Instead of asking, “What are we choosing to do with it?”
That’s a dangerous shift.
Because much of what we hear about AI isn’t news—it’s speculation. Predictions dressed up as inevitability. Possibility framed as destiny.
And a lot of it isn’t journalism at all. It’s marketing.
Corporate press releases become headlines. Investment hype becomes public anxiety. And fear spreads faster than understanding.
Here’s the irony: The more we talk about AI in abstract, dramatic terms, the less prepared we actually become to deal with it.
Real AI impact doesn’t happen in headlines. It happens quietly—in hiring software, in loan approvals, in surveillance systems, in classrooms. Incremental. Bureaucratic. Boring.
And boring things don’t make the news.
So instead, we get the spectacle. The apocalypse stories. The miracle cures. The endless “this changes everything” announcements.
But today—today—the bigger story might be inflation. Or a local election. Or a policy decision that affects millions of lives by tomorrow morning.
AI doesn’t need to be in the news every day to be taken seriously. In fact, constant attention makes it harder to see clearly.
Because technology isn’t the main character of our story. We are.
AI is a tool. Powerful, yes—but still a tool shaped by incentives, laws, and values.
So maybe the most responsible thing the media could do today is let AI sit quietly in the background and put the spotlight back where it belongs:
On human choices. Human consequences. And human accountability.
Because the future isn’t being written by machines.
It’s being written by us—whether or not AI makes the headlines.
Keep the Clankers out of the news! Thank you.