Quartz Is Publishing AI-Generated Articles Based on Other AI Slop, Along With Warning They May Be Filled With Errors
G/O Media is once again attempting to use AI to churn out content — while simultaneously warning that anything the AI produces might be littered with mistakes.
As first reported by The Aftermath, the G/O Media-owned business news site Quartz is grinding out AI-generated articles under the byline "Quartz Intelligence Newsroom."
Its articles, penned in bland and formulaic text, field the business news gamut; the site's AI previously only generated standardized corporate earnings updates, but recently began to include full-fledged news hits. At the foot of each article is a telling disclaimer disclosing the use of AI and warning of its likely pitfalls.
"This is the first phase of an experimental new version of reporting," reads the disclaimer. "While we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we'll always be successful in that regard."
That disclaimer in mind, the AI indeed appears to have one significant blind spot in its news articles: the quality and accuracy of its citations, which are frequently mangled — and, in some cases, appear to be regurgitated from even more AI slop.
At the top of each article, "Quartz Intelligence Newsroom" lists the sources from which it compiles its news summaries (OpenAI's web-searching ChatGPT and Google's AI search "Overview" attempt to do the same.) In theory that's a good idea: sourcing is important reasons like transparency and giving credit for others' work.
But on several occasions, as the Aftermath points out, the AI has failed to accurately untangle messy webs of aggregation, for example linking back simply to MSN or Yahoo in cases where those news aggregators simply circulated original reporting from other outlets like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, among others.
Skimming the AI-generated Quartz articles, we also noticed that the AI has repeatedly cited a website called "Devdiscourse," which itself strongly appears to be an automated news site churning out AI-generated news summaries.
Consider an article published today by Quartz's AI, titled "Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk will cap insulin prices to settle a lawsuit."At the top of the article, the publication's "Intelligence Newsroom" cites three sources, starting with a link to a Devdiscourse article titled "Novo Nordisk Caps Insulin Prices in Landmark Settlement."
Like Quartz's AI-generated articles, Devdiscourse's post doesn't list a human byline; instead, it's attributed to "Devdiscourse News Desk," a byline under which the website generates a dizzying amount of content. The post is brief, and doesn't hint at any original reporting.
Even worse? It's outfitted with a laughably bad AI-concocted version of the pharmaceutical unicorn Novo Nordisk's logo, complete with incomprehensible gibberish. The company name is clearly misspelled as "NORDIISK," and under it is "STIAPLAME," an apparently made-up word. (Almost every Devdiscourse article appears to feature similarly garbled AI-generated images.)
Devdiscourse claims to be a "media platform for development stakeholders" helmed by a self-avowed consulting company called "VisionRI." Overall, it seems likely that Devdiscourse is an SEO-focused content farm, working to increase visibility for VisionRI.
The articles aren't disclosed as AI-generated. But Devdiscourse's LinkedIn page, which doesn't list any employees, says that the site is "designed and developed on the framework of machine learning technologies which facilitate smart content based on user interest, user browsing behaviours, location and skill sets." Its images, meanwhile, include an AI disclosure.
To that end, though the hilariously terrible synthetic image seen in the Novo Nordisk article is disclosed as AI-generated, that it would be included at all hints at extremely limited human oversight over at Devdiscourse's content machine — and, what's more, hints at a concerning lack of human oversight regarding the management of "Quartz Intelligence Desk," too. It's hard to believe that any legitimate human writer or editor would consider the "NORDIISK STIAPLAME" graphic acceptable to source in a serious news article.
We reached out to G/O Media, but haven't received a response.
The effort marks the latest of several attempts by G/O Media to use AI to create content for its various brands, each of which have similarly been marred by embarrassing inaccuracies and backlash from human staffers. There was that time the media company used AI to draft error-ridden "Star Wars" clickbait for Gizmodo's beloved io9 blog without notifying the publication's editors; its replacement of Gizmodo's Spanish-speaking staff with machine translation, which quickly mangled several articles; and the AV Club's AI articles that pretty much just copy-pasted material from IMBD pages.
Per Aftermath, Quartz's human writers are frustrated and angered by their owner's latest push towards AI, and understandably so. On the one hand, the articles just aren't very good or engaging; coupled with the AI's inability to coherently and accurately source, it calls the priorities of G/O Media's leadership into question. In the face of pushback and frustration from its employees, G/O Media once again pushed ahead on its seemingly neverending AI efforts — and in doing so has, once again, threatened to undermine the work and reliability of its award-winning websites and the human journalists who work there.
More on AI and media: Large Publisher Lays Off More Than 100 Employees After Striking Deal With OpenAI
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