A.I. has been spilling into the newsroom

[Free]

How AI Is Creeping Into The New York Times

Artificial intelligence seems to be turning up, undisclosed, in the opinion pages of major news publications.

web.archive.org

On Sunday, a writer named Becky Tuch posted an excerpt on X from a months-old New York Times “Modern Love”column that had given her pause. “I don’t want to falsely accuse writers” of using AI, she wrote. “But this reads EXACTLY like AI slop.” The excerpt—from an essay by a mother who had lost custody of her son—described the son’s feelings, at one point, toward his mother: “Not hate. Not anger. Just the flat finality of a heart too tired to keep trying.”

Among the 100-plus replies to Tuch’s post was one by an AI researcher, Tuhin Chakrabarty. He’d run the snippet from “Modern Love” through an AI-detection tool from the start-up Pangram Labs, which flagged it as likely having been AI-generated.

Kate Gilgan, the author of the column, told me that she hadn’t copied and pasted language from an AI model into her work. “However, I did utilize AI as a tool,” she added, seeking “inspiration and guidance and correction.” She said she’d prompted various products (including ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity) to help her stay on topic in a paragraph, for example, or stick to a theme. “I used AI as a collaborative editor and not as a content generator,” she said. In response to questions about the column, a New York Times spokesperson noted that the paper’s contracts require freelancers to abide by its ethical-journalism handbook, which mandates that AI use “adhere to established journalistic standards and editing processes” and that “substantial use of generative A.I.” be clearly disclosed to readers. Asked for comment on whether Gilgan’s AI use rose to the level requiring disclosure, the spokesperson said in an email: “Journalism at The Times is inherently a human endeavor. That will not change. As technology evolves, we are consistently assessing best practices for our newsroom.”

Such a joyful future we all have to look forward to when all news is published, in part or wholly with the aid of A.I., which in turn is scraped into various A.I. databases, to again be output from the ever devolving amalgam of datasets. Wash, rinse, repeat ad infinitum.

It's believed there's a nanotechnology phase of the gray goo apocalypse, but what's actually required beyond the software and an infection of our own intelligence?

 

[Noodles]

NYT supports Palestinian genocide and lets anti trans rhetoric on its site. It is a trash rag.

 

[Free]

It's a good thing there are still human-based investigative journalists..

Prolific finance journalists facing questions over identities

Authors behind more than 1,000 articles decline to share evidence they are real.

pressgazette.co.uk

Four prolific financial journalists who cover the world of cryptocurrency have ignored repeated requests by Press Gazette to verify their identities.

Together, they have written over 1,000 articles for more than 30 different news outlets.

None of the many publications who have published their work has yet been able to verify them either despite being asked to do so by Press Gazette.

And despite purporting to be freelance journalists the four don’t advertise any way to get in touch and book their editorial services.

 

[Free]

The rise and fall of an AI-driven ‘local news outlet’ in South Florida

The search to find out who was behind the South Florida Standard shows how easy it is for the real people behind digital doppelgangers to remain in the shadows

floridatrib.org

South Florida journalist Sofia Delgado was having a great year.

Reporters at the news outlet she helped launch a few months ago, the South Florida Standard, had been regularly publishing three stories a day, every day of the week – including weekends – with articles ranging from a story detailing the Florida Legislature’s budget breakdown, to federal health care workers quitting rather than taking mandatory assignments at Guantanamo Bay, to revelations that deaths at state mental hospitals were linked to systemic neglect.

Born and raised in Hialeah, the bilingual editor-in-chief and mother of two, and her team even published four stories on Easter Sunday.

It would be an impressive – and gruelling – output for many local news outlets in this era of shrinking newsroom budgets.

If it were real.

Yeah, the "bilingual editor-in-chief and mother of two" and her staff, and their work, were all A.I. generated.