The news never stops. There’s always something happening somewhere. Trying to keep up with it can be an unhealthy obsession. I know, because I used to suffer from news addiction. For years, I would visit several news sites a day, sometimes refreshing them multiple times an hour.
This was even though I knew that the news I was imbibing were irrelevant in the sense that I couldn’t do anything about them. I also knew that following breaking news wasn’t a good way to understand what’s happening: It’s better to read reports that cover longer time horizons, go into greater depth and provide more context. But I couldn’t help myself.
A few years ago, I had the idea for a news app that sends alerts only for the most important events, at a frequency of every few days. If nothing important happens for a few days or weeks, it stays silent. The biggest advantage would be that there’d be no need to check the news, since you know that you’ll get an alert if anything sufficiently important happens.
Once it became possible to schedule AI prompts, I tried to get them to implement this. As of April 2025, it didn’t work: The models back then couldn’t distinguish between important events and unimportant events. They were also weirdly incapable of staying silent when they didn’t find anything and would still send me notifications.
This is now a solved problem. I have a scheduled task in ChatGPT that runs every morning, checking what happened. It then decides if it matches a threshold I’ve given it, which is based on a few examples of news I’d have liked to be notified about. I’m getting about one alert a week on average, and it’s always something I’m glad to know about. Otherwise, it stays completely silent.
I’m glad to report the breaking news that I haven’t visited a news site in weeks.
