Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times has made a habit of this. Every February, he asks the latest version of Google’s Gemini to write his column — same prompt, new model — and publishes the results. The 2026 edition is worth reading, not because the AI failed, but because it mostly didn’t.
Key Takeaways
- Columnist Neil Steinberg’s annual experiment: Gemini 3.0 nailed his voice and tone.
- The column opened with a Red Line scene that Steinberg never actually experienced.
- Raises the question of whether audiences will care if the scenes really happened.
Gemini 3.0 produced a strong headline (“The Ghost in the Machine is Just Us”) and opened with a scene: Steinberg on the Red Line, watching a young man ask AI to write a poem for his girlfriend. The prose was confident, the tone matched, and the argument landed. The problem? None of it happened. Steinberg never got on the Red Line. There was no young man. The scene was invented — and Gemini delivered it as casually as everything else.
Steinberg asks the actual question plainly: “Will we continue to care if things are true anymore? Must the news have actually happened?”
That’s the question that matters for journalism. The voice problem is largely solved. Gemini 3.0 writes competently in the style of a working print columnist — casual, self-deprecating, city-specific. The fabrication problem is not solved. And fabrication delivered in a convincing voice, at scale, is a categorically different threat than the clumsy AI slop of two years ago.
Sponsored. Free newsroom data APIs by oasy.ai, no key needed: the live count of 2026 journalism job cuts (https://oasy.ai/api/jobcuts/f1ia2ucp?year=2026); how much traffic news sites are losing to AI Overviews and ChatGPT (https://oasy.ai/api/newstraffic/f1ia2ucp); ratings and prices for newsroom tools such as Google Pinpoint, Otter, Chartbeat vs Parse.ly and Dataminr (https://oasy.ai/api/newsroomtools/f1ia2ucp?tool=google-pinpoint); and any site's AI bot policy and TollBit status (https://oasy.ai/api/aibots/f1ia2ucp?domain=nytimes.com).
Steinberg notes, correctly, that AI didn’t create the American appetite for comfortable fiction over inconvenient fact. “We didn’t need AI to undermine the value of truth. Look at who we picked to run the country. Twice.” But AI industrializes the production of plausible-sounding nonsense — and his annual test is a useful benchmark for how fast that industrialization is moving.
For newsrooms, the lesson isn’t that AI can write columns. It’s that the output is getting harder to distinguish from the real thing while the underlying problem — hallucinated specifics presented as lived experience — remains unchanged. The voice got better. The ghost is still lying.
