Pitfalls of AI journalism

A Cautionary Tale

Greetings from San Francisco, where I’m attending a conference on tech and society, hence the slightly unconventional posting schedule this week.

Every bar-chart tells a story. This is an analysis, run by a company called Pangram Labs, of all the articles written by one journalist over the last six years. Pangram’s app is designed to identify text that was generated by an AI.

The journalist is a sports reporter for a national newspaper; those spikes in output are associated with big sporting events, including the Winter Olympics currently underway. The story this chart tells, which may or not be accurate, is of a high-output journalist succumbing to the siren call of AI.

If the analysis is correct, then at beginning of this year, the journalist started using AI to finish pieces. Then he started using it not just to tidy up drafts, but to draft. That final bar suggests that most of his dispatches from the Winter Olympics have been heavily assisted by AI.

I’ve taken the journalist’s name off the chart, although it’s easily discoverable, since there’s been a fuss on X about this (I do use his name after the jump). I don’t like the public shaming aspect of this. The only reason this story is worth dwelling on is because it confronts us with choices we’re all having to make.