Found myself wincing while reading this story about how Ars Technica fired a reporter over fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool. What a mess. And a tough one to bounce back from. I get asked all the time how I use AI in my work, and my answer is always the same: I don't, for all the reasons I also don't delegate important research to others, plus a whole bunch of other good reasons. But I really am interested in the answer from other journalists, because I suspect I'm in the minority here.
From Futurism.com:
"In the post, Edwards said that he was sick at the time, and “while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep,” he “unintentionally made a serious journalistic error” as he attempted to use an “experimental Claude Code-based AI tool” to help him “extract relevant verbatim source material.” He said the tool wasn’t being used to generate the article, but was instead designed to “help list structured references” to put in an outline. When the tool failed to work, said Edwards, he decided to try and use ChatGPT to help him understand why.
“I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words,” Edwards continued. He emphasized that the “text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars‘ editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that.”
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ars-technica-fires-reporter-ai-quotes
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