Futurism: CNET’s AI articles show evidence of plagiarism

A Futurism investigation found extensive evidence that the CNET’s artificial intelligence-produced stories show phrasing similarities to articles previously published elsewhere, without giving credit, reports Jon Christian.

Christian writes, “In other words, it looks like the bot directly plagiarized the work of Red Ventures competitors, as well as human writers at Bankrate and even CNET itself.

“Jeff Schatten, a professor at Washington and Lee University who has been examining the rise of AI-enabled misconduct, reviewed numerous examples of the bot’s apparent cribbing that we provided. He found that they ‘clearly’ rose to the level of plagiarism.

“We asked Schatten what would happen if a student turned in an essay with a comparable number of similarities to existing documents with no attribution.

“‘They would be sent to the student-run ethics council and given the repeated nature of the behavior would almost certainly be expelled from the university,’ he replied.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.