Incident 455: CNET's Published AI-Written Articles Ran into Quality and Accuracy Issues

Description: AI-written articles published by CNET reportedly contained factual errors which bypassed human editorial review, prompting the company to issue corrections and updates.

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Alleged: unknown developed an AI system deployed by CNET, which harmed CNET readers.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
455
Report Count
7
Incident Date
2022-11-11
Editors
Khoa Lam, Daniel Atherton
A news site used AI to write articles. It was a journalistic disaster.
washingtonpost.com · 2023

When internet sleuths discovered last week that CNET had quietly published dozens of feature articles generated entirely by artificial intelligence, the popular tech site acknowledged that it was true — but described the move as a mere expe…

CNET's Article-Writing AI Is Already Publishing Very Dumb Errors
futurism.com · 2023

Last week, we reported that the prominent technology news site CNET had been quietly publishing articles generated by an unspecified "AI engine."

The news sparked outrage. Critics pointed out that the experiment felt like an attempt to elim…

CNET Is Reviewing the Accuracy of All Its AI-Written Articles After Multiple Major Corrections
gizmodo.com · 2023

Aside from stringing together human-like, fluid English language sentences, one of ChatGPT’s biggest skillsets seems to be getting things wrong. In the pursuit of generating passable paragraphs, the AI-program fabricates information and bun…

CNET Uses ChatGPT to Write Articles, Runs Into Major Issues
webpronews.com · 2023

Tech website CNET tried to use ChatGPT to write articles, but the quality and accuracy left much to be desired.

ChatGPT is the latest conversational AI from OpenAI. The software has gained a massive following thanks to it being one of the m…

CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy
theverge.com · 2023

CNET will pause publication of stories generated using artificial intelligence “for now,” the site’s leadership told employees on a staff call Friday.

The call, which lasted under an hour, was held a week after CNET came under fire for its …

CNET Pauses AI-Written Articles to Let Backlash Die Down
gizmodo.com · 2023

CNET told staff it would halt the publication of articles generated via artificial intelligence, in a Friday call, according to a report from The Verge. Or, at least, the company said it would pause the AI-article practice “for now,” as it …

CNET Cops to Error Prone AI Writer, Doubles Down on Using It
gizmodo.com · 2023

After getting caught using an algorithm to write dozens of articles, the tech publication CNET has apologized (sorta) but wants everybody to know that it definitely has no intention of calling it quits on AI journalism.

Yes, roughly two wee…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.