Simon Willison’s Weblog

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4 items tagged “the-onion”

2025

Goddammit. The Onion once again posted an article in which a portion of the artwork came from an AI-generated Shutterstock image. This article was over a month old and only a portion of the image. We took it down immediately. [...]

To be clear, The Onion has a several-person art team and they work their asses off. Sometimes they work off of stock photo bases and go from there. That's what happened this time. This was not a problem until stock photo services became flooded with AI slop. We'll reinforce process and move on.

Ben Collins, CEO, The Onion

# 28th January 2025, 6:55 pm / slop, ethics, generative-ai, the-onion, ai

2010

The Onion Uses Django, And Why It Matters To Us. The Onion ported their main site from PHP and Drupal to Django in three months with a team of four developers, including a full migration of their archived content. Their developers answer questions about the switch in this thread on the Django sub-reddit.

# 25th March 2010, 6:43 pm / reddit, django, python, the-onion, php, drupal

2009

Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum. “West says the school inadequately prepares students for the black seas of infinity.”

# 7th March 2009, 11:11 am / lovecraft, the-onion, funny

2003

The onion gets it spot on

Okay, now I have absolutely no intention of taking this blog in a political direction (for the record I’m anti-war) but I’ve seen a couple of links to the Onion recently that I just can’t resist blogging. First up is Bush: “Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Propserity is Finally Over” which was written two years ago but, read now, just looks spookily accurate (link via Back-to-Iraq). The second one is the absolute classic God Angrily Clarifies “Don’t Kill” Rule, linked by Simon Brunning.