New York Times Fires Freelancer Over AI Plagiarism

The New York Times recently ended its collaboration with Alex Preston, a freelance writer, after an artificial intelligence tool he was using copied passages from an already published book review. This decision follows the discovery that the tool had reproduced excerpts from a review by Christobel Kent, published in the Guardian, concerning the novel "Watching Over Her" by Jean-Baptiste Andrea.

Preston, who was working on his own review of this book, used the AI tool to assist him in his writing. However, he was unaware that the tool had extracted passages directly from the Guardian article. An attentive reader noticed the similarities and alerted the newspaper, leading to the termination of the collaboration between Preston and the Times. Some of Preston's phrases were nearly identical to those of Kent, indicating that the AI tool had directly pulled content from the Guardian article.

In a statement to the Guardian, Preston expressed his embarrassment and acknowledged that he had made a "serious mistake." It appears he used the tool thinking it was merely a writing assistant, without realizing that it could search for and copy existing content from the web.

A similar incident was reported at Ars Technica, where an editor published an article containing fabricated quotes. These quotes had been attributed to a developer blog, but the AI model, ChatGPT, had not been able to access the blog's site. As a result, it likely generated the quotes based on the prompt and URL provided. Again, the user of the tool had not verified the source of the information.

These incidents highlight the potential dangers associated with using artificial intelligence tools without a thorough understanding of how they operate, raising questions about the integrity and reliability of generated content.