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Whether due to generative AI hallucinations or human sloppiness, the internet is increasingly rife with bogus news content—and you can count EFF among the victims. WinBuzzer published a story June 26 with the headline, “Microsoft Is Getting Sued over Using Nearly 200,000 Pirated Books for AI Training,” containing this passage: winbuzzer_june_26.png That quotation from EFF’s Corynne McSherry was cited again in two subsequent, related stories by the same journalist—one published July 27, the other August 27. But the link in that original June 26 post was fake. Corynne McSherry never wrote such an article, and the quote was bogus. Interestingly, we noted a similar issue with a June 13 post by the same journalist, in which he cited work by EFF Director of Cybersecurity Eva Galperin; this quote included the phrase “get-out-of-jail-free card” too. winbuzzer_june_13.png Again, the link he inserted leads nowhere because Eva Galperin never wrote such a blog or white paper. When EFF reached out, the journalist—WinBuzzer founder and editor-in-chief Markus Kasanmascheff—acknowledged via email that the quotes were bogus. “This indeed must be a case of AI slop. We are using AI tools for research/source analysis/citations. I sincerely apologize for that and this is not the content quality we are aiming for,” he wrote. “I myself have noticed that in the particular case of the EFF for whatever reason non-existing quotes are manufactured. This usually does not happen and I have taken the necessary measures to avoid this in the future. Every single citation and source mention must always be double checked. I have been doing this already but obviously not to the required level. “I am actually manually editing each article and using AI for some helping tasks. I must have relied too much on it,” he added. AI slop abounds It’s not an isolated incident. Media companies large and small are using AI to generate news content because it’s cheaper than paying for journalists’ salaries, but that savings can come at the cost of the outlets’ reputations. The U.K.’s Press Gazette reported last month that Wired and Business Insider had to remove news features written by one freelance journalist after concerns the articles are likely AI-generated works of fiction: “Most of the published stories contained case studies of named people whose details Press Gazette was unable to verify online, casting doubt on whether any of the quotes or facts contained in the articles are real.” And back in May, the Chicago Sun-Times had to apologize after publishing an AI-generated list of books that would make good summer reads—with 10 of the 15 recommended book descriptions and titles found to be “false, or invented out of whole cloth.” As journalist Peter Sterne wrote for Nieman Lab in 2022: Another potential risk of relying on large language models to write news articles is the potential for the AI to insert fake quotes. Since the AI is not bound by the same ethical standards as a human journali
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Original reporting: Deeplinks