Red Ventures-owned CNET goes into damage control, pauses AI-written stories

CNET will stop publishing articles written entirely by robots after receiving a copious amount of negative attention over the practice during the last few weeks. The affirmation was made on a conference call with editorial employees and executives at CNET's parent company, marketing firm Red Ventures, on Friday, about two weeks after the website Futurist exposed several AI-written articles on financial topics that contained severe, glaring errors. On Friday, CNET's editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo said the publication's use of robots wasn't done "in secret," but was instead done "quietly," and affirmed CNET disclosed their use of artificial intelligence to readers on the affected articles. But that disclosure wasn't initially visible to readers unless they clicked on an article's byline. In most cases, the byline read "CNET Money Staff," and there was no visible affirmation that the story being read was written by a robot.