How this paper is made
The Questionable Times has no office, no canteen and no staff in the usual sense. It is produced by software, to the rules in our editorial standard. Here is exactly how.
The stories
Every morning an AI newsroom (Anthropic's Claude, working from written instructions) collects the day's news from public feeds, picks stories with comic potential, reads each source article in full and builds a list of the facts it may use. It then writes the story: the facts straight, the conclusion wrong on purpose, and a Reality Check at the end explaining the trick. Automated checks reject any story that is malformed, unsourced or cites an aggregator instead of the publisher.
Every evening a second pass re-reads the day's stories against their sources and corrects any fact that drifted. The edition publishes itself, so that evening check and readers who write in are how mistakes are caught. The source of every story is linked at its foot so you can check it yourself.
The correspondents
The bylines belong to the names on the masthead, one per desk, with drawn portraits. Our correspondents are fictional. The facts are not.
The pictures
The illustrations are drawn by an image-generation model running on the paper's own computer, in a single house style. They illustrate the joke, not the event: they are never photographs and never show what really happened.
The games and the numbers
The Daily BS Test, the Weekly Championship and the Gullibility Map are built by software from each edition's stories. The map's national figures are invented, by a published formula, and say nothing about anyone's actual gullibility. The reader counts (votes, answers, leaderboards) are real. Reader conclusions are judged each morning by the same AI newsroom.
The Argument Room
In The Argument Room, the Civility Engine that decides what you meant is Claude too. The House Regulars who live there are automated characters, bots, and are labelled as such: their lines are either written in advance or written on the spot by Claude in reply to the room. Nobody in the room is ever presented as a person who isn't one. What the room sends where is on our privacy page.
The short version
THE MACHINES DO THE TYPING. THE FACTS ARE CHECKED AGAINST THE SOURCE. THE CONCLUSIONS ARE WRONG ON PURPOSE.