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Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

CNET’s AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism – Futurism (Jon Christian | January 2023)

Posted by Connar Allen in Research Integrity on February 3, 2023
Keywords: Institutional responsibilities, Publication ethics

The Linked Original Item was Posted On January 24, 2023

Chat bot Robot Online Chatting Communication Business Internet Technology Concept.

CNET’s AI-written articles aren’t just riddled with errors. They also appear to be substantially plagiarized.

The prominent tech news site CNET‘s attempt to pass off AI-written work keeps getting worse. First, the site was caught quietly publishing the machine learning-generated stories in the first place. Then the AI-generated content was found to be riddled with factual errors. Now, CNET‘s AI also appears to have been a serial plagiarist — of actual humans’ work.

This piece and the alleged misuse of ChatGPT is a ‘good’ demonstration that this natural language processing (NLP) service should not be used unedited for outputs of any kind.  It really should only be used as a tool to create an early draft of any item, to be carefully reviewed and edited by a human.  The reputation of institutions and publications can be seriously tarnished by the careless use of this technology.

The site initially addressed widespread backlash to the bot-written articles by assuring readers that a human editor was carefully fact-checking them all prior to publication.

Afterward, though, Futurism found that a substantial number of errors had been slipping into the AI’s published work. CNET, a titan of tech journalism that sold for $1.8 billion back in 2008, responded by issuing a formidable correction and slapping a warning on all the bot’s prior work, alerting readers that the posts’ content was under factual review. Days later, its parent company Red Ventures announced in a series of internal meetings that it was temporarily pausing the AI-generated articles at CNET and various other properties including Bankrate, at least until the storm of negative press died down.

Now, a fresh development may make efforts to spin the program back up even more controversial for the embattled newsroom. In addition to those factual errors, a new Futurism investigation found extensive evidence that the CNET AI’s work has demonstrated deep structural and phrasing similarities to articles previously published elsewhere, without giving credit. 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.

A robot bent down to all fours in the rain.
CNET's AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism
CNET's AI-written articles aren't just riddled with errors. They also appear to be substantially plagiarized.

Related Reading

Tools such as ChatGPT threaten transparent science; here are our ground rules for their use – Nature (January 2023)

ChatGPT: our study shows AI can produce academic papers good enough for journals – just as some ban it – The Conversation (Brian Lucy & Michael Dowling | January 2023)

Science journals ban listing of ChatGPT as co-author on papers – The Guardian (Ian Sample | January 2023)

Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists – Nature (Holly Else | January 2023)

ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove – Nature (Chris Stokel-Walker | January 2023)

AI and Scholarly Publishing: A View from Three Experts – The Scholarly Kitchen (Anita De Waard | January 2023)

Scientists, please don’t let your chatbots grow up to be co-authors – Substack (Gary Marcus | January 2023)

Comparing scientific abstracts generated by ChatGPT to original abstracts using an artificial intelligence output detector, plagiarism detector, and blinded human reviewers (Papers: Catherine A. Gao et. al. | December 2022)

AI et al.: Machines Are About to Change Scientific Publishing Forever – ACS Publications (Gianluca Grimaldi & Bruno Ehrler | January 2023)

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