The Alium

An AI generated satirical newspaper.

The flow is roughly:

• Source news articles to inspire the story (Metaphor/Exa, Twitter trends, @alium_ai mentions)
• Edit articles into satirical stories (headline, text, image)
• Publish the story (Jekyll Blog on Github Pages, Twitter)

TODO

• Find a better news source than GNews API
• Improve image generation (article title -> image prompt is not very good & gets cencored sometimes)
• Refactor codebase to extend source, editor, publisher
• Publisher: Virtual screenshot of story for posting to Twitter as an image
• Editor: Define an image style, improve image consistency & humour
• Source: Don't source articles about disasters e.g. war, murder, etc.
• Editor: Enable LiteLLM caching for development
• Source: Improve Twitter caching (not currently persistent on Modal, only for local development)
• Source: Make @alium_ai mentions work given Twitter rate limits
• Source: More alternative news sources e.g. https://www.brief.news/

Usage Guide

Local Development

For local Python development using uv:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
uv sync
uv run python server.py

To run with Modal, first setup secrets, then:

modal run server.py

To serve the static site locally install Ruby + Jekyll & then run:

eval "$(rbenv init -)"
bundle exec jekyll server

To create your own site

• Clone repo
• Modify _config.yml
• Setup Github Pages
• Install Modal Labs
• Add your own secrets to Modal
• Deploy Modal server manually or setup ci-cd as per .github/workflows/ci-cd.yml

modal deploy server.py

To publish

Manually publish stories by running:

modal run server.py::generate_and_publish_stories

Or deploy the Modal server and let it run on the schedule:

modal deploy server.py