The Onion's AI Strategy: Why Satire Can't Be Automated

Taking a hard line against AI

When Ben Collins took the helm of The Onion in April 2024, he inherited a 37-year-old satirical institution that had been slowly dying under private equity ownership. Eighteen months later, the publication has resurrected its print edition, grown to 56,000 subscribers, and become the 13th largest print publication in America.

At the core of this revival is an unwavering stance: The Onion is "fervently getting hardcore against AI in every way."

Speaking at the Online News Association conference in September 2025, Collins didn't mince words about artificial intelligence's creative capabilities: "I can tell you right now, I know for a fact that AI is not funny at all. It's like the least funny technology that exists."

The reasons AI fails at comedy go deeper than technical limitations. According to Collins, AI represents "the synthesis of all the stuff on the internet" and produces content that picks "the middle of everything." But as he points out, "jokes are never the middle of anything."

This assessment aligns with academic research. A 2023 study found that when asked for 1,008 "original" jokes, ChatGPT produced the same 25 jokes more than 90% of the time—none of which were actually original. Professor Michael Ann DeVito at Northeastern University, analyzing an AI-generated George Carlin special, noted that AI lacks the nuanced storytelling that defines great comedy: "That can't be replicated by the AI. That is too nuanced."

Comedy requires what AI fundamentally lacks:

When audiences detect AI-generated content, Collins warns, "they feel really betrayed." In comedy especially, where the baseline practice touches "what it is to be alive," authenticity isn't negotiable.

Even The Onion isn't immune to AI's encroachment. In January 2025, Collins discovered that an article contained artwork sourced from an AI-generated Shutterstock image. His response on social media was immediate and revealing:

"Goddammit. The Onion once again posted an article in which a portion of the artwork came from an AI-generated Shutterstock image. We took it down immediately."

Collins explained the challenge: "This was not a problem until stock photo services became flooded with AI slop." 

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Taking a hard line against AI

When Ben Collins took the helm of The Onion in April 2024, he inherited a 37-year-old satirical institution that had been slowly dying under private equity ownership. Eighteen months later, the publication has resurrected its print edition, grown to 56,000 subscribers, and become the 13th largest print publication in America.

At the core of this revival is an unwavering stance: The Onion is "fervently getting hardcore against AI in every way."

Speaking at the Online News Association conference in September 2025, Collins didn't mince words about artificial intelligence's creative capabilities: "I can tell you right now, I know for a fact that AI is not funny at all. It's like the least funny technology that exists."

The reasons AI fails at comedy go deeper than technical limitations. According to Collins, AI represents "the synthesis of all the stuff on the internet" and produces content that picks "the middle of everything." But as he points out, "jokes are never the middle of anything."

This assessment aligns with academic research. A 2023 study found that when asked for 1,008 "original" jokes, ChatGPT produced the same 25 jokes more than 90% of the time—none of which were actually original. Professor Michael Ann DeVito at Northeastern University, analyzing an AI-generated George Carlin special, noted that AI lacks the nuanced storytelling that defines great comedy: "That can't be replicated by the AI. That is too nuanced."

Comedy requires what AI fundamentally lacks:

When audiences detect AI-generated content, Collins warns, "they feel really betrayed." In comedy especially, where the baseline practice touches "what it is to be alive," authenticity isn't negotiable.

Even The Onion isn't immune to AI's encroachment. In January 2025, Collins discovered that an article contained artwork sourced from an AI-generated Shutterstock image. His response on social media was immediate and revealing:

"Goddammit. The Onion once again posted an article in which a portion of the artwork came from an AI-generated Shutterstock image. We took it down immediately."

Collins explained the challenge: "This was not a problem until stock photo services became flooded with AI slop." 

When Collins's team approached The Onion's union during acquisition negotiations, they expected resistance. Instead, they found reasonable requests: a salary floor raise and the right for anything AI-related to be opt-in for employees.

"Those are beyond reasonable," Collins said. The union negotiations became a blueprint for protecting creative workers while maintaining editorial quality. Collins is adamant about staying out of editorial decisions: "I've never touched Onion copy. I just do businessy stuff."

The publication maintains what Collins calls "institutional knowledge for 37 years of knowing exactly how to do this thing"—a 120-page style guide that writers follow religiously. This rigorous creative process, combined with human judgment honed over decades, produces what AI cannot: the "unsaid sentence that's going on in everybody's head" that makes The Onion's satire resonate.

The Onion's anti-AI stance coincides with a broader authenticity crisis in media. According to an Adobe study released in 2024:

Collins believes this creates opportunity: "The economy of the audience is getting people to give you 100 bucks to do brave stuff and get a newspaper in the mail. That should and can be the economy of a lot of news places."

The Onion abandoned programmatic advertising entirely (what Collins calls the "boner-pill ad shawl that covered all of our content") and bet on direct reader support. The gamble paid off with explosive subscription growth that would have taken other publications years to achieve.

Collins's approach challenges the prevailing narrative that AI adoption is inevitable for media survival. The Onion demonstrates an alternative path by doubling down on what humans do uniquely well. 

Dr. Alex Connock from Oxford's Saïd Business School predicts that 2025 will be "the year the levee breaks" for AI in entertainment, with production studios pivoting from cautious experimentation to aggressive integration. Yet even he acknowledges this won't "replace the media industry itself."

Collins frames The Onion's position within a broader context of media integrity under pressure. His perspective on AI was directly shaped by his years at NBC News covering disinformation and extremism, including reporting on the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. "I was really burnt out, I was covering the disinformation and extremism. That was my whole job. And there's only so many times I could watch that stuff, go through the cycle."

At NBC, Collins witnessed institutional pressure eroding journalistic courage. This experience shaped his understanding that authenticity is not merely aesthetic but existential. Collins sees a direct parallel between the disinformation he spent years documenting and AI-generated content. Both flood information spaces with inauthenticity. Both create betrayals of trust. As he describes the information warfare he covered, one side has "effectively created a slot machine of snuff films that dictates all policy, like policy by horrific viral data."

For Collins, the fight against AI content is a continuation of his fight against disinformation. When he rescued The Onion, a primary goal was preventing it from being according to Wikipedia "turned into an AI slop farm," the same fate he feared if Elon Musk had purchased it.

"We have Jester's privilege," Collins says, referring to satire's unique legal and cultural protections. "It allows us to be a little bit more open about what is going on in the world, and we use it."

The publication's attempted acquisition of Infowars (currently stalled in legal proceedings) represents this ethos in action—using satire to reclaim spaces "dominated by misinformation" and transforming conspiracy into comedy.

Looking ahead, the Onion plans to continue expanding its print operation, launch more video content, and potentially create "a little network" of authentic human-created comedy. Collins has a simple but clear goal: "I want to be able to give people more space for jokes."

Collins's advice to other media organizations is direct: "Be as loudly yourself as you can be. And personalize it, and be human, because this voice from God stuff is not gonna work with you."