Fake Stories, Real Rants, and the Rise of the Machines

In the future, we'll all just sit around the house and watch pornography

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What happens when a legacy newspaper unknowingly fills a Sunday supplement with AI-generated gibberish? You get a public mea culpa, a media credibility crisis—and one hell of a conversation between two seasoned observers of the human condition: broadcast vet Big John Howell and sportswriting legend Rick Telander.

In this episode of Chicago Smokehouse, John and Rick tackle the real-world fallout from the Chicago Sun-Times' now-notorious “Heat Index” insert, which featured AI-generated book recommendations so obviously fake that even casual readers smelled the circuits burning. What followed was finger-pointing, outsourcing confessions, and another sobering reminder of how generative AI is reshaping media—faster than most institutions can keep up.

From newsroom buyouts and freelance content mills to the philosophical implications of AI-authored architecture and war strategy, Howell and Telander take a ride through our uneasy future with machine-generated everything. Telander recounts his early experiments with ChatGPT, including a hauntingly Hemingway-esque short story about a dog named Brewster, while both hosts contemplate whether human creativity can survive in a world of algorithms, auto-tune, and moral ambiguity.

Also covered:

• Ernest Hemingway’s brain trauma and tragic end

• Hunter S. Thompson’s controlled chaos

• The ethics of war in an AI-directed battlefield

• Buddy Rich’s infamous tour bus tirades

• Michael Jordan punching Steve Kerr

• Why Casey Kasem’s meltdown might still be humanity’s finest moment