How MISTAKE works

The route is always the same: real world signals, then AI analysis, then a future scenario, then satire, then an editorial check, then MISTAKE. Nothing skips a stage, and nothing reaches the site without passing the last one. The sequence matters more than any individual tool in it, because it is what keeps the invention downstream of the evidence.

Written out, it looks mechanical. In practice most of the work is discarding: signals that lead nowhere, scenarios that are merely bleak, jokes that are funny but rest on nothing at all. A publishable story is usually the fourth or fifth attempt at the same underlying trend, and most trends never produce one.

A story begins with reporting we did not write: research coverage, regulatory filings, product announcements, standards work, court decisions, labour disputes. We are looking for the point where a specialist development has started to leak into ordinary life, because that is where a scenario has somewhere to go. No signal, no story.

These signals are summarised in plain language in the Reality Behind the Joke block on every article. They are pointers to the kind of evidence a reader can go and check, not decorative citations. If we cannot describe the underlying trend in one sentence a sceptical reader would accept, we treat that as a failed story and drop it.

MISTAKE uses AI tools across the production process: scanning and clustering sources, detecting which trends are accelerating, generating and stress-testing story ideas, drafting and localising text between English and Hungarian, producing illustration, and preparing content for publication. This is ordinary modern production work, and we see no reason to be coy about it.

What AI does not do here is decide. It does not choose what is true, what is fair, or what is worth publishing. It is fast at breadth and unreliable at judgement, and the workflow is built around exactly that asymmetry: the machines widen the field, and the editors narrow it back down again.

The scenario is the serious part. We set a year, take a trend that is already underway, and ask what follows if the incentives currently driving it simply keep driving it. The result is usually plausible and rarely comfortable. At this stage the piece is not funny at all, and it is not supposed to be.

Satire comes afterwards, as a matter of framing rather than content. We look for the detail inside the scenario that is quietly ridiculous and let the reporting voice deliver it without comment. The humour is in the flatness. If a story only works because of a joke, the scenario underneath it was too weak to publish.

Before anything publishes, an editor reads it against a fixed list: is the scenario clearly speculative, is the date set forward, is the Reality Behind the Joke block accurate and plain, are real people and companies treated fairly, and could any sentence be mistaken for a factual claim about the present. Failing any one of these sends the piece back.

This gate is human, always, and it is the slowest part of the process by design. Automation can produce a great deal of material very quickly; the check exists so that speed is never the reason something was published. An editor is accountable for every story on this site, including the ones that started as a machine suggestion.