News Outlet's Use Of AI Leads To Errors, Plagiarism

News outlet CNET said Wednesday it has issued corrections on a number of articles, including some that it described as “substantial,” after using an artificial intelligence-powered tool to help write dozens of stories, Catherine Thorbecke reported for CNN.

Photo Insert: The outlet has since hit pause on using the AI tool to generate stories.

The outlet has since hit pause on using the AI tool to generate stories, CNET’s editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo said in an editorial on Wednesday. The disclosure comes after Futurism reported earlier this month that CNET was quietly using AI to write articles and later found errors in one of those posts.

While using AI to automate news stories is not new – the Associated Press (AP) began doing so nearly a decade ago – the issue has gained new attention amid the rise of ChatGPT, a viral new AI chatbot tool that can quickly generate essays, stories and song lyrics in response to user prompts.

Guglielmo said CNET used an “internally designed AI engine,” not ChatGPT, to help write 77 published stories since November.

She said this amounted to about 1% of the total content published on CNET during the same period and was done as part of a “test” project for the CNET Money team “to help editors create a set of basic explainers around financial services topics.”

“Editors generated the outlines for the stories first, then expanded, added to and edited the AI drafts before publishing,” Guglielmo wrote. “After one of the AI-assisted stories was cited, rightly, for factual errors, the CNET Money editorial team did a full audit.”

The result of the audit, she said, was that CNET identified additional stories that required correction, “with a small number requiring substantial correction.” CNET also identified several other stories with “minor issues such as incomplete company names, transposed numbers, or language that our senior editors viewed as vague.”

Another correction suggests the AI tool plagiarized. “We’ve replaced phrases that were not entirely original,” according to the correction added to an article on how to close a bank account.

WEEKLY FEATURE : MVP Group Keeps Lights On During Pandemic