Reporter CJ Baker was sitting in his cubicle at the Powell Tribune office in Northwest Wyoming when his editor started reading an article out loud.
“Yellowstone National Park, known for its stunning landscapes and diverse wildlife, is a place where visitors come to experience nature’s beauty,” the story read.
It was from a competing paper, the Cody Enterprise.
“This incident serves as a stark reminder of the unpredictable nature of human behavior, even in the most serene settings,” it said.
His editor thought that was a weird way to end a story about a shootout — especially one in which someone died.
“I turned to him, I said, ‘I know where that comes from,’” Baker recalled. “And I said, ‘That's AI.’”
Baker said it sounded a lot like writing he’d seen from a chatbot.
Still, he said suspecting another paper’s reporter was using AI wasn’t a story in itself, but then he started finding other parts of stories that he thought were made up.
So he reached out to people who’d been quoted by the reporter in Cody. Seven people said they’d never talked to him, including the governor, an astronomer and a racoon expert.
“I think there's a lot of room for disagreement in journalism about how best to do things, but the red line is that you never make stuff up,” Baker said.
At a think tank in Florida, one of the leading experts on AI was also intrigued.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” said the Poynter Institute’s Alex Mahadevan, who Baker chatted with before publishing his investigation. “I had never heard of a reporter using AI to generate quotes yet.”
Mahadevan had seen other kinds of misuses of the technology -— like having AI write stories and creating fake bylines — but not like this.
He said things like that paragraph describing Yellowstone and calling the incident “a stark reminder” are a dead giveaway.
“So you might see a paragraph that tries to sum up the situation and wrap it up in like a nice bow that somebody would try to write on their SAT,” Mahadevan said.
The scandal was picked up by media outlets around the country and reporters have continued to talk about the ramifications.
For his part, Mahadevan is a big proponent of using some AI in journalism, especially in small newsrooms.
“They should be using generative AI to do transcription, meeting summaries, to try to cover more communities, experimenting with ethical, but innovative ways to do your jobs better,” he said.
But Mahadevan added that it’s critical to have a clear public policy on how it’s being used.
The Cody Enterprise reporter who resigned is not commenting. But the paper’s leaders apologized and said they now have a system in place to catch AI-generated stories.
The Powell Tribune, which uncovered the scandal, is also working on developing a policy, according to Baker.
And other journalists around Wyoming are paying attention, including Sarah Squires.
“I’m the managing editor of The [Riverton] Ranger, Wind River News and Lander Journal newspapers,” she said, sitting in her Central Wyoming office near a printing press.
Squires runs a pretty traditional newsroom. The walls are plastered with calendars and story ideas. The radio and a police scanner run in the background.
The newsroom has a policy of not using AI, and when news of the use of it in Cody broke, she made sure to tell her audiences that in an editorial.
She’s also making sure she knows what all of her writers’ voices sound like, so she could detect any AI.
“AI will never be something that we use for writing, but we do see potential out there in terms of maybe using AI to sort large volumes of data,” Squires said.
But, for now, she’s keeping her reporters focused on basic techniques like talking to people and opening up books instead of always relying on computers.
“Walk on your two legs and go to the library, go to the historical society,” she said, “and do that kind of old-fashioned research that I grew up with.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio (KNPR) in Las Vegas, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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