“Former Head Of Irish Indo Publisher Using Fake AI Quotes In Articles Is A New Low For Journalism”

WWN Opinion Editor Adriana Ocasio-Cortez speaks about distrust in media in the wake of news that Peter Vandermeersch, former Ireland Chief Executive of the publishing group that owns the Irish Independent, has been suspended pending formal investigation for using fake, AI-generated quotes in a number of his articles:

“Journalism is battling a credibility problem and this certainly doesn’t help. It’s an incident that will be used as a stick to beat hard working journalists at stretched publications owned by entities that dole out lucrative returns to investors despite having to regularly cut jobs.

How can we trust what we read or the people tasked with writing the stories we consume if there’s always that suspicion that in a race to the bottom, we are choosing the lazy AI-assisted option?

How can journalism secure its foundations and its well-earned reputation if we can’t even be bothered to fabricate our own made-up quotes and ‘sources’, instead leaving it to the AI LLMs?

I fear there will be more scandals like this, and I, Adriana Ocasio-Cortez can only fight my corner, wage my journalistic war and hope you, my dear readers, know everything I do is genuine and original work.

That someone who enjoyed such a prominent position at executive level of an Irish media group seemed to even care so little about his own opinions that he outsourced them to a word-garbling machine that cannot be relied on for truth or veracity is such a rich example of all that is wrong with modern media leadership and I for one Limit Reached I’d love to assist you with this! However, you’ve hit the limit of free message. Consider upgrading to Premium Claude Ai Assistant to get limitless prompts and output!”

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