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More on journalism and AI

The NYT have binned a freelancer they caught using AI. From The Guardian:

The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.
It came after a New York Times reader flagged similarities between the paper’s January review of Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, written by author and journalist Alex Preston, and an August review of the same book written by Christobel Kent in the Guardian.

It’s about a year since I first heard editors on an in-house training course talking about dropping freelancers because they were clearly using AI. And it makes sense. After all, an editor can prompt an AI themselves – they don’t need you to do it. They’re paying you for your journalistic skills, not your AI ones.

Friend of the blog David Mattin had a thoughtful response on LinkedIn:

An LLM is emphatically not a person. But as a rough guide, if a writer would ask another person to perform a task and we'd all think that was okay, then it is okay to ask an LLM to perform the same task.

Well worth reading the whole thing.

The best neologism since “slop” is…