I Built an AI That Invents a New Conspiracy Theory Every Hour, On Purpose
Somewhere around 2 a.m., wedged between "what if I learned woodworking" and "I should really go to bed," I had the kind of idea that only sounds good at 2 a.m.: what if there were a website that just… made up a fresh conspiracy theory every hour, forever, with no human involvement whatsoever?
Reader, I built it. It's called Conspiracy Team, and it is exactly as responsible as it sounds.
The Premise
The internet already has a thriving cottage industry of people connecting unrelated dots with red string. My contribution to society is to automate that process, strip it of all sincerity, and host it on Azure for roughly the price of a cup of coffee per month. Every hour, on the hour, a small army of cloud functions wakes up, reads the actual news, squints at it suspiciously, and produces a brand-new, completely fictional theory about who's really behind it all. Birds? Suspicious. Big Pretzel? Always suspicious. The moon? Don't even get me started.
To be extremely, legally, and morally clear: this is satire. Every theory is fiction, generated by a language model that has watched too many documentaries and not enough therapy sessions. No real people are being accused of anything. The whole point is that the conspiracies are obviously, gleefully, structurally absurd — a parody of the genre, not a contribution to it.
How the Sausage Is Made
The stack is almost aggressively over-engineered for a joke website, which is, frankly, half the fun:
- An Azure Functions timer trigger fires every hour like a very punctual cult leader.
- It pulls fresh headlines from free RSS feeds (Reuters, AP, BBC, Google News) so the theories are at least grounded in real events, even if their conclusions are not.
- Azure OpenAI (gpt-4o-mini) does the actual writing, with prompts carefully tuned to keep things tongue-in-cheek rather than mean-spirited.
- Azure AI Content Safety acts as the bouncer, making sure the model doesn't say anything it shouldn't about anyone it shouldn't.
- The finished theories get stored in Cosmos DB (serverless, free tier — because I am not made of money).
- An Angular 18 SSR frontend on Azure Static Web Apps serves it all up, fronted by a NestJS API running on Container Apps with scale-to-zero, because paying for idle CPU offends me on a spiritual level.
- Secrets live in Key Vault, accessed via Managed Identity, because even a joke deserves good security hygiene.
Total estimated cost: about $1–$4 a month. Cheaper than a domain renewal. Cheaper than therapy. Definitely cheaper than the lawyers I would need if this site were sincere.
Why Bother?
A few honest reasons, ranked from least to most truthful:
- It's funny. A website that confidently publishes "Big Lemon may be behind the recent surge in iced tea prices" every hour is funny. I will die on this hill.
- It's a love letter to a genre that deserves mockery. Conspiracy theorists take themselves incredibly seriously. Automating their entire creative process and reducing it to a cron job feels, to me, like a fair response.
- It's a perfect excuse to play with the stack. Azure OpenAI + Functions + Container Apps + Cosmos + Content Safety + Bicep, all wired together end-to-end, is a genuinely useful architecture to have built once. The fact that it produces nonsense about geese running the Federal Reserve is a bonus.
- It scratches the same itch as a model train set. You build a tiny, self-contained world that runs on its own, and you check in on it occasionally to make sure nothing has caught fire.
What's Next
Honestly? More dumb features. RSS feeds so you can subscribe to fresh conspiracies in your reader of choice. A "rate this theory's plausibility" button that is, of course, rigged. Maybe a daily roundup email titled "What They Didn't Want You To Know This Week." Maybe a printable zine. We'll see how far the joke can be pushed before Azure starts asking questions.
In the meantime: the site is live, the timer is ticking, and somewhere in a data center in eastus, a very small AI is hard at work, connecting dots that should never have been connected.
Wake up, sheeple. The truth is out there. It's just that this particular version of it is fictional, automated, and costs me less per month than a sandwich.
Conspiracy Team is a satire project. All content on the site is AI-generated fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, organizations, or actual events is coincidental and intentionally ridiculous. Please do not forward any of these theories to your uncle.