NEW ORLEANS—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.”
In January 2024, Collins posted on Bluesky: “So uh, how do we buy The Onion?”
With an investment from former Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, that unlikely outcome happened.
“Within six weeks, we got it,” he said. “It was a crazy, harrowing thing, and I’m very glad we could save it.”
The reborn Onion has not only stripped its site of what Collins called “entirely programmatic ad slop” but relaunched a print edition that now has nearly 56,000 paying subscribers. “We are the 13th largest newspaper in the United States, which is really stupid—an indictment on all of us.”
Asked by Patel why The Onion would pivot to print when an increasing number of real newspapers are ceasing print publication, Collins suggested that it was the most Onion-esque thing to do. “It’s both nostalgic and also possibly the funniest way we can exist,” he said, adding that readers wanted “something in their mailbox that wasn’t evil.”
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The conversation took a more serious turn when Collins warned that the assumption that Kirk’s murderer was a far-left activist (the suspect does not fit that pattern) would lead to the Trump administration trying to punish dissenting views.
“There is a horrific crackdown on speech that is definitely now incoming as of yesterday,” he said. “They have the pretext that they always wanted to go after any form of dissent.”
Collins pledged to continue The Onion’s mockery. “We have jester’s privilege. And we use it.”
The Onion is also still trying to complete a purchase of Infowars, the fraudulent conspiracy theory site run by Alex Jones. In November, a group led by The Onion won an auction for that site conducted to pay for the $1.4 billion awarded to families of Sandy Hook school shooting victims. They sued Jones over his repeated lies that the 2012 mass murder was a hoax.
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Soon after, a federal bankruptcy court held up the sale, leading to months of legal back-and-forth that may be nearing an end in The Onion’s favor after a ruling last month by a state judge in Texas that placed Infowars in the custody of a state receiver directed to sell it.
“It’s a gigantic pain in the ass,” said Collins. “I don’t recommend it. I don’t recommend trying to buy a psychopath’s website.”
The Onion’s plan for Infowars remains unchanged: use it to mock that site’s advertisers, “the whole supplement-selling, beef-tallow business.”
Collins paused to note the absurdity of The Onion becoming a face of Trump dissent. “It’s the dumbest world where we are called to be brave,” he said before urging the journalists in the room to do the same. “Be brave despite it all, because people will reward you.”
During the audience Q&A that followed, Collins couldn’t resist returning to AI when an attendee working on an AI startup brought up that subject. Yes, he allowed, AI can help society if it’s used on narrow, focused tasks. But that’s not what AI boosters keep talking about, and AI hype is inflicting real-world consequences.
“AI as a premise has laid off tons of my friends with no replacement and made society profoundly worse,” Collins said.
And yet stupid amounts of money keep sloshing around AI startups, which led him to offer the sort of advice you might see in an Onion story if it involved OpenAI offering a journalist $20 million to do… whatever. “Take the fucking money. It’s all good,” he said as the audience laughed. “And brag about it afterwards.”
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