Writer and author Alex Preston said he “made a serious mistake” after a reader spotted similarities between his review and one that appeared in the Guardian

At a certain point, these are going to become Dog Bites Man stories. I used an LLM to assist with my writing at my last job to avoid plagiarism via paraphrasing, not to advance it.

But those were, for the most part, government press releases already technically in the public domain. The ethical concern was claiming someone else’s words as my own via laziness or just a momentary lapse in judgment.

That can and does happen, and LLMs are invaluable for removing most of that risk.

But a fucking book review? Why were you even reading someone else’s before sitting down to write? The point of literary analysis is to bring your expertise to the table, not to find out what others thought.

</rant>

The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.

It came after a New York Times reader flagged similarities between the paper’s January review of Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, written by author and journalist Alex Preston, and an August review of the same book written by Christobel Kent in the Guardian.

The New York Times launched an investigation, during which Preston admitted that he had used AI to assist writing the review and did not spot the sections that were pulled from the Guardian before submitting it. In a statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Preston said that he was “hugely embarrassed” and had “made a serious mistake”.

The New York Times alerted the Guardian to the overlap in an email sent on Monday, and added an editor’s note to the review acknowledging the use of AI and linking to the Guardian piece. “A reader recently alerted the Times that this review included language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in the Guardian,” reads the editor’s note. “We spoke to the author of this piece, a freelancer reviewer, who told us he used an AI tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove. His reliance on AI and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of the Times’s standards.”

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    Just another accountability sink used-up and replaced.

    That’s one social arrangement for AI. Here’s another: last May, the Chicago Sun-Times included a 64-page “Best of Summer” insert from Hearst Publishing, containing lists of things to do this summer, includ­ing a summer reading list. Of the 15 books on that list, ten did not exist. They were AI “hallucinations” (jargon used by AI hucksters in place of the less sexy, but more accurate term, “errors”).

    This briefly lit up the internet, as well it should have, because it’s a pretty wild error to see in a major daily newspaper. Jason Koebler from 404 Media tracked down the list’s “author,” a freelancer called Marco Buscaglia, who confessed that he had used AI to write the story and professed his shame and embarrassment at his failure to fact-check the AI’s output.

    …In a discussion on the 404 Media podcast, Koebler offered perspective on this, describing the early days of his career when, as an intern at the Washington Monthly, he would be called upon to contribute to guides like Hearst’s “Best of Summer” package. In those days, three interns would be assigned to each of the lists, overseen by a professional journalist and backstopped by a fact-checking section.

    Seen in this light, the story of the nonexistent books in the summer reading guide takes on an entirely different complexion. The “Best of Summer” guide contained ten lists, almost all written (or rather, “writ­ten”) by one person: Buscaglia, evidently without any fact-checking whatsoever (many of the other lists also contained egregious errors).

    In other words: Hearst’s King Features, who published the “Summer Reading Guide,” replaced 30 interns, 10 newsroom journalists, and an entire fact-checking department with one freelancer. No one has reported on how much Buscaglia got paid to write all those lists, but if it comes out to the total wages of all those people whose job he was doing, I’ll stick my tongue in a light socket.

    …

    I don’t know if Hearst told him to use a chatbot to generate their “Best of Summer Lists,” but it doesn’t matter. When you give a freelancer an assignment to turn around ten summer lists on a short timescale, everyone understands that his job isn’t to write those lists, it’s to supervise a chatbot.

    But his job wasn’t even to supervise the chatbot adequately (single-handedly fact-checking 10 lists of 15 items is a long, labor-intensive pro­cess). Rather, it was to take the blame for the factual inaccuracies in those lists. He was, in the phrasing of Dan Davies, “an accountability sink” (or as Madeleine Clare Elish puts it, a “moral crumple zone”).

    https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/