The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn’t going very well. There have been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely avoidable mess.
As U.S. news outlets fire staffers and editors, cut corners, and endlessly compromise integrity and standards, they’re also apparently being increasingly duped by people using AI to generate bogus stories and reporting. Like this freelancer for Business Insider and Wired, who apparently tricked editors at both publications into publishing several completely fabricated stories written mostly by LLMs.
The freelancer, who called herself Margaux Blanchard, apparently doesn’t exist. She pitched both outlets on a story about a town called Gravemont, “a decommissioned mining town in rural Colorado” that was purportedly repurposed into “one of the world’s most secretive training grounds for death investigation.” Except the town in question, like the author, apparently doesn’t exist.
The Press Gazette did a little digging and found that “at least” six publications published various articles by the fake person using AI, which all kind of piggybacked on each other to give the fake journalist credibility to get future stuff published. Including one article about a couple who met in Roblox, fell in love, and got married. But the couple, and nobody else in the article, appears to exist:
“The interviewees in the article do not seem to match up to any people about whom information is publicly available on the internet. For example the article cites “Jessica Hu, 34, an ordained officiant based in Chicago” who it says “has made a name for herself as a ‘digital celebrant,’ specialising in ceremonies across Twitch, Discord, and VRChat”. However, no such officiant appears to exist.”
This is less surprising for Business Insider (which increasingly traffics in clickbait and recently fired 25% of its staff) and more surprising for Wired, which has been doing a lot of great journalism during the second Trump term. It’s particularly embarrassing given the parade of extremely talented writers and editors that have repeatedly been shitcanned by many of these same outlets over the last decade.
Wired was at least transparent about the fuck up, publishing an article explaining how they were tricked, noting they only figured things out when the freelancer refused payment via traditional systems. But they acknowledge they didn’t adhere to traditional standards for fact checking (who has the time, apparently):
“We made errors here: This story did not go through a proper fact-check process or get a top edit from a more senior editor. First-time contributors to WIRED should generally get both, and editors should always have full confidence that writers are who they say they are.”
This country has taken an absolute hatchet to quality journalism, which in turn has done irreparable harm to any effort to reach reality-based consensus or have an informed electorate. The rushed integration of “AI,” usually by media owners who largely only see it as a way to cut corners and undermine labor, certainly isn’t helping. Add in the twisted financial incentives of an ad-based engagement infotainment economy, and you get exactly the sort of journalistic outcomes academics long predicted.
That, in turn, creates an environment rich for exploitation by the shittiest people imaginable, including random fraudsters, and the weird extremist zealots currently running what’s left of the United States.
From Techdirt via this RSS feed