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By Casey Bukro
Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists
In the first known case of deliberate falsification using artificial intelligence in journalism, a novice reporter for the Cody Enterprise has resigned and the editor apologized.
The futuristic technology in this case fabricated quotes attributed to various people, including Wyoming’s governor, who had not been interviewed by the reporter, Aaron Pelczar, a 40-year-old new to journalism.
It is the latest scandal in the troubled history of a new technology that blurs the difference between what is real and what is not.
Generative artificial intelligence of the kind being used in journalism grows by being fed information created by others, an algorithmic learning process. In essence, AI is a copycat, a plagiarist and mistakes it makes are called hallucinations.
No hallucination
The story Pelczar wrote with the assistance of artificial intelligence was no hallucination, though it did turn out to be a nightmare for the Cody Enterprise.
“AI was allowed to put words that were never spoken into stories,” admitted Enterprise Editor Chris Bacon, and apologized that he “failed to catch” the false quotes.
“They’re very believable quotes,” said Bacon, pointing out that people he spoke to during his review of Pelczar’s articles said the quotes sounded like something they would say, but they never actually talked to Pelczar.
Did not intend to misquote
Upon resigning, Pelczar said he never intended to misquote anyone.
This controversy began with an investigation by a reporter for a competing newspaper, CJ Baker of the Powell Tribune.
A reporter for 15 years, Baker noticed that several of Pelczar’s articles seemed oddly worded, including one that ended with instructions on how to write a news story, which had no bearing on the article.
In another oddity characteristic of generative AI, the questionable stories added incorrect roles and titles to people.
Calling people
Baker began calling people named in Pelczar’s articles who were quoted, and discovered none had spoken to Pelczar, though the quotes sounded plausible, which is characteristic of generative AI text.
Baker met with Pelczar and his editor with evidence that at least seven people who were quoted were never interviewed.
“It’s never comfortable to confront someone, but it’s especially uncomfortable when it involves colleagues in the media world,” Baker said. “What helped is that the editor at the Cody Enterprise, Chris Bacon, was gracious and receptive.”
My job
In an editorial, Bacon wrote: “It matters not that the false quotes were the apparent error of a hurried rookie reporter that trusted AI. It was my job.” He also apologized to the governor and others who were falsely quoted.
“I will eat crow with what dignity I can muster,” he wrote, “though pheasant tastes much better. I will do better.” He was working on an AI policy for the newspaper and as part of its hiring practice, “this will be a pre-employment topic of discussion.”
Megan Barton, Cody Enterprise publisher, wrote on the paper’s website: “AI isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially in our line of work. We take extreme pride in the content that we put out to our community and we trust that the individuals hired to accurately write these stories are honest in gathering their information. So, you can imagine our surprise when we learned otherwise….
“Plagiarism is something every media outlet has had to correct at some point or another. It’s the ugly part of the job. But, a company willing to right (or quite literally write) those wrongs is a reputable one. So, take this as our lesson learned.”
Longer conversations
Barton wrote that the newspaper now had a system to recognize AI-generated stories and will “have longer conversations about how AI-generated stories are not acceptable.”
It’s not the first time the media have been roiled by artificial intelligence, as well as falsification and plagiarism. Last year, Sports Illustrated came under fire for product reviews published under fake author names with fake author profiles.
Kelly McBride, senior vice president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said of the Cody episode: “This sort of deception by a reporter is very similar to the old-fashioned ethical failures of plagiarism and fabrication. It’s what Jayson Blair did at The New York Times more than 20 years ago. He got caught when a reporter at a smaller paper called him out for plagiarizing her work.”
Newsrooms learn
Newsrooms can learn from such situations, she added.
Alex Mahadevan, also of the Poynter Institute, said it’s easy to create AI-generated stories: “These generative AI chatbots are programmed to give you an answer, no matter whether that answer is complete garbage or not.”
Humans must be alert enough to notice if the chatbots are deceiving them. In an ironic historic twist, the Cody Enterprise controversy grew out of an area famous for tall stories and western lore.
Cody Enterprise founded
The Cody Enterprise was founded in 1899 by William Fredrick Cody, otherwise known as Buffalo Bill, a showman most widely known for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a traveling show featuring battles between American Indians and cowboys and soldiers. It toured across the United States and in Europe.
Cody, Wyoming, population 10,028, also is named for Buffalo Bill. The twice-weekly newspaper’s circulation is 4,675.
Though born in Iowa territory, Cody started his legend when he was only 23, performing in shows with cowboy themes and episodes from the frontier and Indian Wars.
Pony Express
At the age of 15, so the story goes, Cody became a rider for the legendary Pony Express, an express mail delivery service. And he claimed to be a trapper, bullwacker, wagonmaster, stage coach driver and hotel manager.
Historians have had difficulty documenting that, saying some of it might have been fabricated for publicity.
This much is known, during the Civil War, he served the Union from 1863 to the end of the war in 1865. Later, he was a civilian scout for the U.S. Army during the Indian Wars, for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1872. He lost the award when it was rescinded in 1917 for 910 recipients, many of whom were not in the military.
Medal reinstated
Congress reinstated the Medal of Honor for Cody and four other civilian scouts in 1989.
Cody got his nickname, Buffalo Bill, after the Civil War, when he got a contract to supply Kansas Pacific Railroad workers with American bison meat. Code reportedly killed 4,282 buffalo in 18 months in 1867 and 1868.
Cody cut a rugged figure, dressed in primitive frontier garb, with a mustache and a long chin beard. His fame grew with the help of American dime novel author Edward Zane Carroll Judson, whose pen name was Ned Buntline, who was no stranger to fanciful writing.
Cody’s adventures
Buntline published a story based on Cody’s adventures, largely invented by Buntline. He followed that with a highly successful novel, Buffalo Bill, King of the Bordermen, which was serialized in the Chicago Tribune.
Sequels followed and an enduring legend was born.
Like Buffalo Bill himself, artificial intelligence is seen in different ways by various people, a modern miracle or some kind of media doomsday machine.
Different versions
Where journalism is concerned, artificial intelligence seems like one of those Japanese movies in which several observers of an event tell different versions of what they saw.
Writing for the Brookings Institution, Courtney C. Radsch asks: “Can journalism survive artificial intelligence?” In the past 20 years, she points out, the U.S. lost two-thirds of its newspaper journalist jobs – jobs that AI cannot fill.
Despite that, she writes, AI advancements continue the “platformization” of journalism and enabling a handful of technology firms to maintain their control over our information channels.
Double down
“Journalism can only survive if the news industry unites to double down on journalists and demand a framework in their deals with tech giants that benefits journalism in the public interest.” It depends, she adds, on whether journalism can adapt its business models to the AI era.
With AI, “innovation in journalism is back,” writes David Caswell for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
“Following a peak of activity in the mid 2010s, the idea of fundamentally reinventing how news might be produced and consumed had gradually become less fashionable, giving way to incrementalism, shallow rhetoric and in some cases even unapologetic ‘innovation exhaustion.’
Urgent focus
“No longer. The public release of ChatGPT in late November of 2022 demonstrated capabilities with such obvious and profound potential impact for journalism that AI-driven innovation is now the urgent focus of the senior leadership teams in almost every newsroom. The entire news industry is asking itself, ‘what’s next?’
Jack Shafer, writing in Politico, said artificial intelligence is poised to change the news business at every level.
“Used effectively, it promises to make news more accurately and timely. Used frivolously, it will spawn an ocean of spam.” The future has not yet been written, says Shafer. AI in the newsroom will be only as bad or good as its developers and users make it.
Times copyright suit
The New York Times sees artificial intelligence as a thief of intellectual property. The nation’s foremost newspaper in December sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, opening a new front in an increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies.
“Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism,” the complaint says, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of “using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.”
OpenAI said The Times was not telling the whole story.
In a substack, journalism veteran James O’Shea charges that prophets of artificial intelligence are meeting their own worst enemy: Themselves.
“From the manipulation of posts on Elon Musk’s careless X platform to the dishonest bots exposed by NewsGuard on its Reality Check service, misuse of the AI technology pollutes the promise touted by its champions.”
The objective
This talk of the promise of artificial intelligence prompts a question: How did all of this get started and what was the objective?
Like much of today’s advanced technology, it started with something that seems like science fiction. A history of artificial intelligence says it began with ancient myths and stories of artificial beings with human intelligence.
Quests attempting to describe the process of human thinking led to the programmable digital computers in the 1940s.
That device inspired a handful of scientists to discuss the possibility of building an electronic brain.
The field of AI research was founded at a workshop held on the campus of Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956.
Scientists predicted that a machine as intelligent as a human would exist in no more than a generation, but it became obvious that researchers grossly underestimated the difficulty of the project, leading investors to become disillusioned and withdrawing funding in a time known as an “AI winter.”
But powerful computer hardware and breakthrough technology brought us to where we are today, with machines that think in ways that scientists do not fully understand. And they have “hallucinations.”
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The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was founded in 2001 by the Chicago Headline Club (Chicago professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. It partnered with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2013. It is a free service.
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