For more than 20 years, print media has been a bit of a punching bag for digital-technology companies. Craigslist killed the paid classifieds, free websites led people to think newspapers and magazines were committing robbery when they charged for subscriptions, and the smartphone and social media turned reading full-length articles into a chore. Now generative AI is in the mix--and many publishers, desperate to avoid being left behind once more, are rushing to harness the technology themselves. Several major publications, including The Atlantic, have entered into corporate partnerships with OpenAI and other AI firms. Any number of experiments have ensued--publishers have used the software to help translate work into different languages, draft headlines, and write summaries or even articles.

CNET has issued corrections for over half of the AI-written articles the outlet recently attributed to its CNET Money team. Following an internal audit after it was first notified of an AI-written article with substantial errors, CNET Editor-in-Chief Connie Guglielmo says the publication identified additional stories that required correction. She claims a "small number" needed "substantial correction," while others had "minor issues" that saw CNET fix things like incomplete company names and language the outlet deemed was vague. In all, of the 77 articles the publication now says were written as part of a trial to test an "internally designed AI engine," 41 feature corrections. As The Verge points out, some articles feature corrections that note CNET "replaced phrases that were not entirely original."

This year has seen massive advances in article writing by AI. The Open AI Institute released its GPT-2 article generator last month after earlier in the year saying it was too dangerously powerful to release to the public. You can try it with small text seeds here. Another article generator introduced in May, Grover, is described as'A State-of-the-Art Defense against Neural Fake News' which can detect whether AI wrote articles, however it also swiftly generates fairly good articles. Below I have put an article generated by Grover given only the title and my website as a reference (I do like how it calls me Professor!).