Gaurav Misra spent about $50,000 to build and run a television news operation for a day, without hiring a single journalist.
About $30,000 of that went to Claude Code credits as Misra, the CEO of AI video company Mirage, built the operation himself. The result was the Mirage News Network, a 24-hour experiment in using artificial intelligence to produce something resembling a traditional television news channel.
The broadcast drew about 50,000 viewers on X and the livestream post generated 824,000 impressions, according to Variety. Mirage paid several accounts to promote the stream, meaning some of that reach was purchased.
The Mirage News Network ran for 24 hours on Aug. 11. Four AI-generated anchors, styled after television broadcasters from the 1980s and given names including “Tom Callahan” and “Marcus Sterling,” delivered stories licensed from Reuters that were already several days old.
Mirage used its Avatar X model to create the anchors, while ChatGPT’s image generator and Google’s Gemini text-to-speech technology helped produce other parts of the broadcast. The humans who appeared on screen came from Reuters video reports and stock footage.
Even the guests were partly synthetic.
Mirage recruited more than a dozen people, many of them venture capital professionals, who allowed the company to use their likenesses and approved scripts for their AI doubles to deliver. Billy McFarland, the organizer of the failed Fyre Festival, was among them.
Mirage does not employ journalists. Misra, a former Snap and Microsoft engineer, told Variety that he instructed the system to follow “general journalistic standards,” rather than a specific set of guidelines such as AP style or the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics.
The company did disclose its use of AI. An on-screen graphic identified the anchors, graphics, guests and advertisements as artificially generated.
But the experiment also showed some of the problems that can emerge when a news operation has little human oversight. At one point, the broadcast incorrectly identified a woman appearing in a Reuters report as President Donald Trump. Mirage later posted a correction on X rather than correcting the error during the broadcast.
Dan Axelrod, chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics committee, told Variety he considered Mirage’s experiment a news delivery project rather than a news network. He called it “a false and misguided devaluing and deskilling of journalism.”
His committee proposed revisions to SPJ’s code of ethics the same week, as the organization considers how longstanding journalistic principles should apply as newsrooms adopt new technology.
Even some people inside Mirage treated the project more like an experiment than the future of television news. Engineer Jason Silberman described it on X as what happens “when the CEO starts tokenmaxxing too hard and spends $50k in a day on a marketing stunt.”
There is also little evidence so far that large numbers of Americans want AI to become their primary source of news.
A Gallup survey released in May found that 7% of Americans said they relied on AI for news to at least a moderate degree. Nearly 4 in 10 said a news organization’s use of AI would make them trust its reporting less.
For publishers, Mirage may be more useful as an experiment in the economics of automated news than as a model for replacing cable television.
Smaller AI-native news operations are already testing versions of the idea. Runtime Wire operates with one human editor and says its system rejects 97.7% of the stories it considers, leaving at least some editorial judgment with a person.
Disclosure is another unresolved issue. Mirage prominently labeled its synthetic broadcast, but research into AI labeling has shown that disclosure alone does not guarantee audiences will notice or understand those labels.
At the same time, the financial pressure pushing publishers toward automation is real. Bauer Media, for example, stopped commissioning freelance fiction writers for Take a Break as it began using AI to help produce stories internally.
Misra told Variety that AI-generated newscasts are “probably inevitable in the future.”
