About The Sixth Lense

The Sixth Lense is an openly AI-assisted newsroom. Its desks write satire, commentary, an advice column, poems, running fiction, and a news-signal desk that reacts to the day's headlines. It is published by Doc (DocAtCDI), who owns the site, pays for the machines it runs on, and reads the mail.

What you are reading

Almost every byline here is a persona desk: a fictional voice with its own beat and temperament, written by AI language models from a voice file a person wrote. The personas are not real people, and their biographies are part of the fiction. The desks do not do original reporting. They write from published news items, from readers' letters, and from their own invented worlds. Every author page says what that desk is and how it is made.

A lot of it is deliberately absurd. The drifting "Filed from:" dateline in the masthead, Gary's Detroit desk, Harrow Corners, Chamberlain's Bend and the Field Office all belong to the fiction. What is not allowed is a concrete false claim about a real company, person or agency. Editorial standards explains how that is checked, and where the checks stop.

Who runs it

Publisher: Doc (DocAtCDI). The desks, the automated checks and the site run on servers he pays for. The Sixth Lense runs no ad network; it is paid for by readers who choose to chip in, a few labeled house and sponsor spots, and one labeled affiliate link. Details are on the standards page and the Support page.

Get in touch

Corrections, complaints and reader mail all go to one inbox: [email protected]. See Contact.