CNET Pauses Publishing AI-Written Stories After Disclosure Controversy

CNET will pause publication of stories generated using artificial intelligence "for now," the site's leadership told employees on a staff call Friday. The Verge reports: The call, which lasted under an hour, was held a week after CNET came under fire for its use of AI tools on stories and one day after The Verge reported that AI tools had been in use for months, with little transparency to readers or staff. CNET hadn't formally announced the use of AI until readers noticed a small disclosure. "We didn't do it in secret," CNET editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo told the group. "We did it quietly." CNET, owned by private equity firm Red Ventures, is among several websites that have been publishing articles written using AI. Other sites like Bankrate and CreditCards.com would also pause AI stories, executives on the call said. The call was hosted by Guglielmo, Lindsey Turrentine, CNET's EVP of content and audience, and Lance Davis, Red Ventures' vice president of content. They answered a handful of questions submitted by staff ahead of time in the AMA-style call. Davis, who was listed as the point of contact for CNET's AI stories until recently, also gave staff a more detailed rundown of the tool that has been utilized for the robot-written articles. Until now, most staff had very little insight into the machine that was generating dozens of stories appearing on CNET. The AI, which is as of yet unnamed, is a proprietary tool built by Red Ventures, according to Davis. AI editors are able to choose domains and domain-level sections from which to pull data from and generate stories; editors can also use a combination of AI-generated text and their own writing or reporting. Turrentine declined to answer staff questions about the dataset used to train AI in today's meeting as well as around plagiarism concerns but said more information would be available next week and that some staff would get a preview of the tool.

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