How an AI-generated story caused an uproar at Gizmodo

Pranshu Varma of The Washington Post writes about how a story written by artificial intelligence about Star Wars movies caused an uproar at tech site Gizmodo.

Varma writes, “Lauren Leffer, a Gizmodo reporter and member of the Writers Guild of America, East union, said this is a ‘very transparent’ effort by G/O Media to get more ad revenue because AI can quickly create articles that generate search and click traffic and cost far less to produce than those by a human reporter.

“She added the trial has demoralized reporters and editors who feel their concerns about the company’s AI strategy have gone unheard and are not valued by management. It isn’t that journalists don’t make mistakes on stories, she added, but a reporter has incentive to limit errors because they are held accountable for what they write — which doesn’t apply to chatbots.

“Leffer also noted that as of Friday afternoon, the Star Wars story has gotten roughly 12,000 page views on Chartbeat, a tool that tracks news traffic. That pales in comparison to the nearly 300,000 page views a human-written story on NASA has generated in the past 24 hours, she said.”

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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.