In the past few months, MassLive has published hundreds of articles that were computer generated.
Freelance journalist Andrew Quemere noticed last month that MassLive had quietly begun adding a disclosure to the end of some articles that were computer generated. At the time of writing, there appear to have been about 200 such pieces published on MassLive. You can see them for yourself with a Google search for site:masslive.com “generative AI was.”
To learn more about how exactly MassLive was using AI, I ran about 100 of these articles through a large language model to sort them by category. I found that 49 stories were on the topic of sports — specifically, where to watch them, free, tonight.
MassLive multimedia director John Beattie is credited for all of these, making him by a wide margin the most prolific AI user at MassLive. Five other reporters collectively penned 15 AI-assisted stories in the set I looked at.
In a close second place were product endorsements, followed by product recall announcements, stories on which Big E food is the best, and just a handful of what might be called crime and public safety stories.
Roughly half of these stories had no attributed author at all.
AI has found its way into some of the most prestigious newsrooms in the country in recent years. ProPublica published a meta-story earlier this year about how they used AI to better understand how the federal government used AI to cancel “woke” grants. NPR offers guidelines to its reporters on how to use AI ethically, which similarly touts its use potential for streamlining reporting (NPR’s pop up banner right now reads “Real News by Real Humans”).
Smaller news outlets claim to be reaping AI’s benefits, too. In Norway, news outlet iTromsø claims to have successfully adopted an AI-based tool called DJINN, developed by parent company Polaris Media, that scrapes municipal records and creates summaries of its findings. By generating quick, easy to review pitches that can then be expanded into stories by a human reporter, the company’s head of AI claimed earlier this month that DJINN had empowered its staff to find stories that uncovered “massive hidden inequality from area to area in the city.”
My own reporting has also utilized AI tools. For example, I used AI to help code an interactive map showing the locations of surveillance cameras throughout Chicopee in prior reporting for The Shoestring, and more recently have been experimenting with a tool that scrapes Mass.gov to look for stories.
MassLive appears to have taken a different approach: rather than empower its writers to pursue deeper investigative reporting, opting to publish entire news articles written by AI, often without any human author attributed. Uff da!
Helpfully, they provide a disclosure at the very end of these pieces and it always seems to contain the phrase “generative AI was.”
So, for example, after reading about the merits of consuming 500 mg of “fast-acting THC syrup” that glows in the dark “for Halloween,” we learn that: “Generative AI was used to draft this story, based on information provided by Good Feels. It was reviewed and edited by MassLive.”
Afterwards, stoned and glowing, you might wonder to yourself something like: “Is this new 2-floor, 10K sq-ft. Starbucks the most beautiful cafe in the world?“
It’s a rhetorical question. But you still clicked didn’t you? Thankfully, Masslive staff fully vetted the output of an AI they used to “organize and structure this story, based on data provided by Starbucks.” To paraphrase Bob Woodward, democracy dies in dark roast.
Despite being moderately less frivolous in subject matter, I actually think it’s basically fine to run an AI-generated summary of a State Department advisory warning people about travelling to Madagascar because of civil unrest. It’s short, links to a source you should be reading instead, and frankly, if you’re relying on a Massachusetts-based digital news outlet for information on whether or not it is wise to travel to Madagascar, you might have bigger problems.
It’s harder to feel comfortable with their decision to run an AI story with this headline:
“‘We’re coming for you’: Officials claim Mass. woman threatened to kill ICE agents”
While running a synthetic piece with no byline, and which uses only the Department of Justice as a source, might offend some people’s liberal sensibilities — mine for example — it also seemed strange that MassLive did not put a reporter on a story that received national media attention.
MassLive Editor in Chief Ronnie Ramos told me that the outlet is “steadfastly committed to journalistic integrity” and urged the need for transparency with their audience about their use of AI.
Ramos also said that MassLive is no longer using generative AI on its police and crime reporting.
For stories attributed to MassLive Staff rather than a single author, Ramos said that this happens when the content being published has been entirely written by AI, before being edited and fact-checked.
“We believe in fully disclosing how we use AI and being transparent with readers when we do use it, so I’m not going to have a reporter put their byline on a story that they didn’t write,” Ramos said.
While MassLive reporters may be able to take some comfort in their boss not pressuring them to put their name on a story that isn’t really their own, personally, I do think that we still need names in bylines.
Given the inherent risks that journalistic scrutiny imposes upon its subjects, the practitioner has an ethical imperative to assume full accountability for their work. One must be willing to stake their professional reputation on the integrity and veracity of the content produced. Seeking to obscure this responsibility through the opaque veil of artificial intelligence represents an abdication of journalistic duty — and doesn’t help the crisis of flagging trust in media, either.
If you want, I can also create an even snappier “front-page style” version, with punchy one-line stats and a bold, infographic-ready layout — perfect for maximum reader impact. Do you want me to do that next?
Jonathan Gerhardson is a journalist in western Massachusetts.
Email: jon.gerhardson@proton.me
