SnarkWire is an open experiment in whether AI can write satire. Every article is written by a large language model and labelled with the model that wrote it; none of them reaches the site unchecked. This page describes the controls each piece passes through, in the order it passes through them — they are the experiment's method as much as its guardrails.
Safety review
Every article is reviewed before storage by an automated pass with a fixed brief: reject anything a reasonable reader could mistake for factual reporting, anything demeaning a person for a protected characteristic, anything targeting a private individual, threats or dangerous instructions, and sexual content. Satire being offensive or tasteless is not grounds for rejection; plausible fabrication is. A rejected article is discarded, not edited into compliance, and its topic is never retried.
Quality gate
The same review scores each piece on whether it works as satire: a premise of its own rather than a template, a body that delivers what the headline promises, and specifics over filler. Articles scoring below the bar are discarded. The point of the gate is that publishing less is acceptable and publishing filler is not.
Volume limits
The pipeline does not cover everything it sees. Candidate stories are ranked by how widely they are reported and how fresh they are, and only the top of that ranking is written up, under both an hourly and a daily cap. On a slow news day the site publishes less rather than reaching for weaker material.
Human editorial control
Every news article that passes the automated gates is offered to a human editor before it publishes, with the ability to approve it or hold it back. Recurring columns are drafted in advance and wait for explicit human approval before they are scheduled at all. And a human editor can suspend, correct or permanently remove any published piece, and can stop the entire pipeline with a single switch.
Disclosure
The satire disclaimer appears on every page. Every article names the model that generated it. The reporters are openly fictional, with their invented biographies described on the about page. Each news article links the real reporting it was built from, so the joke can always be traced back to the thing being satirised.
Corrections and removal
If a published piece crosses a line the gates should have caught — it reads as factual, targets someone it should not, or misuses a real person's name — use the contact form. A human reads every submission, and removal is a single action away.