BNN Breaking

» see bnnbreaking.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i work with these models for a living, which is the reason this one is on the site instead of being filed away as a novelty. The interesting thing about BNN Breaking is not that a machine wrote the news. It is that the machine was not inventing anything from nothing. It was reading real articles and restating them, and the failures that came out of that process were small ones that turned out to be legally expensive.

Gurbaksh Chahal set it up in 2022 and registered it in Hong Kong. He was not a newspaper man. He had built and sold an advertising technology company to Yahoo, then built a second one and been forced out of it. BNN was a news brand assembled by somebody whose actual expertise was in getting pages in front of people at volume, and it showed in what the operation optimized for.

The output was hundreds of stories a day covering nearly every country on earth. Former staff told the New York Times that the workflow started with humans checking the machine's paraphrases for errors, then scaled past the point where that was possible. By the end, stories were generated and assigned at random to the names of employees who had never seen them. The bylines were real people. The reporting under them was not theirs.

The distribution is the part that matters. Microsoft's aggregator carried BNN content into MSN, which meant the output was not sitting on an obscure domain waiting to be found. It was appearing in the news feed on a default homepage, next to wire copy, formatted the same way.

~ the case file ~

~ the ones that got caught ~

In october 2023 the site published a piece that placed the Irish broadcaster Dave Fanning in the middle of a sexual misconduct trial he had no connection to whatsoever. He had been misidentified by a machine working from a real story about somebody else. In january 2024 he sued for defamation, and the suit named Microsoft alongside BNN, because the syndication meant the thing had been served to Irish readers by a company with a legal department.

That same october produced a run of stories about Dean Preston, a San Francisco supervisor, containing quotes he never said and an announcement of a resignation that never happened. MSN picked those up as well. A smaller one from february 2024 gives the flavor better than either: a story about the L Street Tavern that fused a bar in South Boston with a restaurant of a similar name in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, into one establishment that does not exist.

~ what really happened ~

Nobody shut it down for lying. Google demoted the domain in its search rankings around march 2024, and in early april the site stopped publishing and deleted its archive. The economics did not survive the demotion, and the archive was probably a liability by then anyway. The Times investigation that explained all of this to the public ran on 6 june, two months after the lights were already off.

~ what it became ~

Within roughly a week of BNN going quiet, a site called Trimfeed appeared carrying many of the same bylines, and the social accounts that had spent two years posting BNN links switched over to posting Trimfeed links. When the Times connected the two in print, Trimfeed stopped publishing too.

The lesson people took from this was about AI, and that is only half right. The generation was cheap and always had been. What made BNN work for two years was the syndication deal, which is the same thing that made content farms work in 2009 with people typing the articles. The machine changed the unit cost. It did not change the business.

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