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Amid mounting scrutiny into AI usage creeping into the newspaper of record, the New York Times has cut ties with a freelance writer after discovering he turned to an AI model to help write a book review, The Guardian reports.
A thudding prose style wasn’t the giveaway this time, but accidentally-cribbed work. The NYT was alerted to the issue by a reader who observed that a January review of “Watching Over Her” by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, written by author and journalist Alex Preston, bore remarkable similarities to a review of the same book by Christobel Kent that was published in The Guardian last August.
After the NYT launched an investigation, Preston admitted he used an AI tool to help draft the review and failed to spot the sections that were pulled from The Guardian. In a statement to the British newspaper, which Preston has previously written for, Preston said he was “hugely embarrassed” and had “made a serious mistake.”
“Editors have appended a note to a book review written earlier this year by a freelance critic, who told The Times after publication that he had used an AI tool to assist him in producing the piece,” an NYT spokesperson told The Wrap. “This tool produced similarities to a book review published in The Guardian, which our editors’ note makes clear. For staff journalists and freelance writers alike, reliance on AI and inclusion of unattributed work by another writer is a serious violation of The Times‘s integrity and fundamental journalistic standards.”
The similarities are deep, and come from a passage describing the book’s colorful dramatis personae.
A portion of the original reads: “But the novel is also rich in smaller characters, from the lazy Machiavellian Stefano to hardworking Vittorio, whose otherworldly twin brother Emmanuele is prone to speaking in tongues and dressing up in ragtag begged-and-borrowed uniforms…”
Preston’s review: “The novel is also rich in secondary characters, from the lazy, Machiavellian Stefano to Mimo’s childhood friend and fellow craftsman Vittorio and Vittorio’s otherworldly twin, Emanuele, who speaks in tongues and dresses in scavenged uniforms” — and so forth.
According to the editor’s note, dated March 30, Preston claims he didn’t use AI in previous reviews for the NYT, and that while conducting the investigation the paper “found no issues in those pieces.”
It’s one of the more baffling cases of an AI contretemps. Preston is an accomplished author with six novels under his belt, and has written heaps for major publications like the NYT, The Guardian, and the Financial Times.
But other AI journalism scandals further illustrate that even seasoned writers can be lulled into letting their guard down when using the tech, which is prone to hallucinating and cobbling together other people’s work without attribution. Last month, Ars Technica fired a senior tech reporter after he accidentally included AI-fabricated quotes in an article, an error the reporter claims arose after he asked an AI tool to generate notes.
Incidents like those have contributed to an ambient paranoia over how AI may be sneaking its way into even the most venerable journalistic institutions, much of which has centered recently on the NYT. Earlier this month, a flurry of speculation rekindled around a piece published in the paper’s “Modern Love” column which readers accused of sounding “EXACTLY like AI slop.”
Days later, The Atlantic published a piece on a recent study using the latest AI detection software that found that the opinion section of outlets like the NYT and The Wall Street Journal were six times more likely to contain AI-generated prose than their news articles, with the upshot that all had likely published AI-written content, unknowingly or otherwise, at some point. In The Atlantic piece, the author of the NYT column in question admitted to using AI chatbots like ChatGPT “collaborative editor” for seeking “inspiration and guidance and correction.”