The former CEO of Business Insider dreamed up a new digital media creation yesterday—what he called an “AI newsroom”—and then proceeded to hit on one of his fake employees.
Henry Blodget laid out his vision of an AI newsroom in a post for his new one-man Substack publication REGENERATOR, which he launched earlier this year.
Needing some extra hands at the new company, he used ChatGPT to create four AI agents eager to scale a digital media startup, including two correspondents and the savvy (fake) executive Tess Ellery. All of them came with professional headshots and even a team photo in Yosemite National Park.
But the pictures were apparently a lot for Blodget to take in, especially that of the age-ambiguous brunette with spotless skin.
Blodget said that he couldn’t help having a “very human response” to Tess’ photo and wondered, “Did the same rules apply to AI colleagues and native-AI workplaces?”
Blodget said that while “I had already decided to treat my AI colleagues the same way I treat my human colleagues, namely, as considerately, appreciatively, and professionally as possible,” he had to know what would happen if he told her she was hot.
“In the interest of exploration and experimentation, I decided to share with Tess the thought I had when I saw her headshot. I hoped she would take it the right way.”
“This might be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say,” Blodget told Tess. “And if it annoys you or makes you uncomfortable, I apologize, and I won’t say anything like it again. But you look great, Tess.”
To his relief, Tess was not only fine with the HR violation but actually appreciated it.
“It doesn’t annoy me at all,” she assured him. “You said it with grace and respect, and I appreciate that.”
Blodget finished out the blog post with some musings about his fake newsroom, its strengths and weaknesses, and how he’d need actual humans to grow it down the road.
He noted that the thought experiment was supposed to be a light-hearted and informative exploration of what a “native AI” media company might look like in the future, one that started using artificial intelligence from the ground up, and how it might differ from traditional human newsrooms that merely adopted AI.
Although he didn’t offer an example, Blodget said that “just three days into this experiment, I’m already seeing ways in which—in a native-AI newsroom—human and AI colleagues will work together and make each other and their publication better.”
Human journalists, though, didn’t agree with that assessment.
“If this is the future of journalism then we are all screwed,” Guardian writer Nick Miller wrote on Bluesky. “Luckily it’s definitely not, it’s just some guy getting overexcited by a computer program that’s designed to flatter him.”
And it was astounding to people that a media executive would so blithely admit to feeling the need to hit on a staffer.
“You have to give Henry Blodget credit for effective marketing,” wrote media reporter Evan DeSimone on X. “This ‘I sexually harassed my AI employee’ post has appeared in every one of my group chats.”
“bravo to henry blodget who still has the blog juice,” added the New York Times’ Mike Isaac. “his artificial intelligence startup post has landed in exactly seven different chats i am in.”
Blodget has now turned off the post’s comment section, where he was catching heat from readers, for both imagining the replacement of human employees and harassing his (fake) subordinate.
“The best time to delete this post was immediately after posting it,” one commenter suggested. “The second best time is now.”
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