Did I Really Say That?

A European journalist apologized for using AI to fabricate quotes—including from me. But there’s little accountability in blaming a chatbot.

Three weeks ago, a Dutch freelancer named Menno van den Bos contacted CJR and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism to tell us he had found a writeup of our Journalism 2050 issue in his country’s press that he suspected of containing AI-generated inaccuracies. In itself this is not surprising. As we have written here before, the incidence of fake quotes and citations from journalists and academics is a growing menace. The Tow Center is frequently cited in error, I and other journalists and researchers are misquoted, and a core citation problem in news that Tow researchers originally identified a year ago is not only not improving, it is generally infecting journalism and academic citation on an increasingly alarming scale.

What was surprising about the incident was that the AI distortions came from a very senior figure in European journalism, Peter Vandermeersch, a former editor in chief at leading Dutch newspaper NRC and chief executive at Mediahuis’s Irish division. Now a kind of intellectual emeritus at Mediahuis, Vandermeersch is an in-house sage, in the official position of a “Journalism and Society fellow.” Or at least he was, until the unchecked and inaccurate use of AI in his work caused his suspension.