CNET Secretly Used AI on Articles That Didn't Disclose That Fact, Staff Say

A CNET spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment, but in a story published today, The Verge corroborated our source's allegations in several ways. Last week, we reported that the prominent tech news site CNET had been quietly posting dozens of articles that had been written by an AI system. After a public outcry, we discovered that in spite of the Red Ventures-owned publication's promise that all the AI-generated articles were being diligently fact checked by a human editor, the AI was making many extremely basic errors. CNET responded by issuing an extensive correction and slapping a warning label on the rest of the content -- as well, oddly, as adding a disclaimer to many human-written articles about AI topics. If all of CNET's AI-generated articles had been marked as such, you could probably write the whole thing off as a dismal, miserly attempt to eliminate the jobs of entry-level writers.