CNET will temporarily stop publishing articles written by AI

News site CNET will temporarily stop using artificial intelligence to write articles. The medium has received a lot of criticism about this in recent weeks and is now pulling the plug on those stories, at least for the time being.

Executives at CNET and publisher Red Ventures indicated that in a conversation with employees, writes The Verge. That was aware of those conversations. Both CNET and other Red Ventures websites, such as creditcards.com, are stopping publishing AI-generated stories.

It was recently revealed that CNET had certain articles written by an artificial intelligence. That was not a version of the recently popular ChatGPT, but a tool built by Red Ventures. CNET had explanation articles about financial situations written by the tool. Although later fact-checkers and editors looked at it, CNET received a lot of criticism. There were regular errors in the articles, some parts of the text appeared to be plagiarized and it was generally unclear to readers which articles were not written by humans. Last week, CNET said it would indicate more clearly which articles were written by AI, but the site has now stopped doing so altogether.

The stop is at least for the time being, say managers, but without giving further details. In the meantime, the publisher has set up a working group that will talk about AI use, but it is not yet clear what exactly it will do. Articles that were previously written by AI remain on the website, but are now provided with a disclaimer.