Five months ago I built a system that autonomously produces satirical news content. Two consumer GPUs, local inference, no cloud bills. It crawls sources, generates scripts, renders audio/video, and publishes ~100 pieces (5 hours+) published every other day, limited due to YT upload quotas, can do more.
Good post, I remember those days well and this exposure we had to all that tech absolutely had its influences for many of us.
The real-world demo of that sms-soda machine was at the Stockholm offices, and one of several why I eventually moved out this way and have stayed.
Though razorfish stuff is pretty spot on except I'm pretty sure Razorfish didnt BUY disinfo, but funded and supported it, IIRC Gary and Richard retained ownership, that was a content play for RSUB, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Razorfish.
...and coincidentally Gary is selling all the brand and contents right now.
ckn (Former IT Director @razorfish 1996-1999, Current Security Champion for R&D @Ericsson)
~6,000 hours published so far on all the platforms: https://doomscroll.fm https://youtube.com/@doomscrollfm
The interesting parts weren't entirely the models, but the job management system, and the TTS, that is always an interesting challenge.
I'm ex-security/devops. This started as a weekend experiment in autonomous systems and spiraled into something that just... runs and runs.
Solo project, no funding, minimal babysitting.
The content itself? It's satirical news. Some of it lands, some doesn't. The uncanny-valley feel left intentional, but the system works...
Happy to discuss the infrastructure challenges if anyone's curious about running this kind of setup on consumer hardware.