The New York Times drops freelancer whose AI tool copied from an existing book review

The New York Times cut ties with freelance writer Alex Preston after it turned out an AI tool he'd used had copied from an existing book review.

Preston was writing a review of Jean-Baptiste Andrea's novel "Watching Over Her" and used an AI tool in the process. What he apparently didn't know: the tool went online and grabbed passages from Christobel Kent's earlier Guardian review of the same book. Preston submitted the piece without noticing. A reader spotted the overlap, and the Times let him go.

Preston told the Guardian he was "hugely embarrassed" and had "made a serious mistake." Some of his sentences were nearly identical to Kent's, which points to the AI tool scraping directly from the Guardian piece. Preston probably assumed he was using a writing assistant, not something that searches the web and copies existing work. He likely just didn't know what his tool was doing.

Something similar happened at Ars Technica recently: an editor ran a story with quotes that were entirely made up, attributed to a developer's blog. That developer had unintentionally blocked ChatGPT from accessing his site. The editor never checked the source and just went with what ChatGPT gave him. Since the model couldn't actually reach the blog, it most likely made up the quotes based on the prompt and URL alone. Again, someone using a tool without understanding how it actually works.