CNET Secretly Used AI on Articles That Didn't Disclose That Fact, Staff Say
CNET published around 78 personal finance explainers over two months in late 2022 under the byline CNET Money Staff, written with an in-house tool, with the disclosure behind a hover on the byline. Futurism found errors of the kind that matter in finance writing, including compound interest arithmetic that was out by a factor of thirty. CNET audited the run and issued corrections on more than half of them, then paused the programme; Futurism separately documented passages closely tracking existing articles elsewhere. Wikipedia downgraded CNET from its list of generally reliable sources. It is the earliest case of a publisher doing this at scale, and the failure that cost the most was not the arithmetic but the byline.
