The prominent tech news site CNET‘s attempt to pass off AI-written work keeps getting worse. First, the site was caught quietly publishing the machine learning-generated stories in the first place. Then the AI-generated content was found to be riddled with factual errors. Now, CNET‘s AI also appears to have been a serial plagiarist — of actual humans’ work.
The site initially addressed widespread backlash to the bot-written articles by assuring readers that a human editor was carefully fact-checking them all prior to publication.
Afterward, though, Futurism found that a substantial number of errors had been slipping into the AI’s published work. CNET, a titan of tech journalism that sold for $1.8 billion back in 2008, responded by issuing a formidable correction and slapping a warning on all the bot’s prior work, alerting readers that the posts’ content was under factual review. Days later, its parent company Red Ventures announced in a series of internal meetings that it was temporarily pausing the AI-generated articles at CNET and various other properties including Bankrate, at least until the storm of negative press died down.
Now, a fresh development may make efforts to spin the program back up even more controversial for the embattled newsroom. In addition to those factual errors, a new Futurism investigation found extensive evidence that the CNET AI’s work has demonstrated deep structural and phrasing similarities to articles previously published elsewhere, without giving credit. In other words, it looks like the bot directly plagiarized the work of Red Ventures competitors, as well as human writers at Bankrate and even CNET itself.
Jeff Schatten, a professor at Washington and Lee University who has been examining the rise of AI-enabled misconduct, reviewed numerous examples of the bot’s apparent cribbing that we provided. He found that they “clearly” rose to the level of plagiarism.
Hellbound and Down 