Ohio-based journalist Kaitlin Durbin called out her employer, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, for slapping her byline on a story she didn’t write — and that was, in fact, generated by artificial intelligence.
She won.
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The local government reporter wrote in an X post on Monday she was on her honeymoon when, apparently, her AI-powered carbon copy was at her desk, plugging away on a mundane news hit about the resignation of a county law director. When Durbin returned from paradise, she logged into the Plain Dealer’s website, Cleveland.com, and didn’t love what she saw.
“I did not write or review a word of it and it does not pull info from past reporting,” Durbin said of the article, which carries the headline “Cuyahoga County Law Director Rick Manoloff to step down Sept. 11.”
“Does cleveland.com think they just own my name now?” Durbin wrote on X.
Durbin’s decision to call out her boss apparently worked: Within hours, her byline had been removed from the article, which now opens with an editor’s note characterizing the byline blunder as an error.
Durbin didn’t respond to an email or phone calls from Straight Arrow seeking comment.
Chris Quinn, the president and editor of the Plain Dealer, characterized the incident as “a simple mistake,” telling Straight Arrow the article published with Durbin’s name due to “a miscommunication between a couple of editors.”
“We fixed it as soon as we learned of it,” Quinn wrote in an email.
Newsrooms embrace AI — and meet resistance
It’s unclear exactly how the Plain Dealer wound up with the reporting behind the AI-generated article. But Durbin, who has worked for the Cleveland paper since 2021, wants no part of it.
The Plain Dealer’s editors, meanwhile, have openly embraced chatbots as authors.
In a column in February, Quinn announced that the 184-year-old newspaper was leaning in on “newsroom artificial intelligence experiments.”
The Plan Dealer’s AI use — and the article carrying Durbin’s byline — has once again put into focus a billowing tension in newsrooms nationwide, as they increasingly adopt chatbots to power, and in some cases write, articles.
Some reporters have been punished for submitting AI-written articles, several of which have led to plagiarism allegations. Other reporters, like Durbin, have criticized their employers’ embrace of chatbots. Among them are journalists at McClatchy, where reporters at the company’s local newspapers — including the Miami Herald and The Kansas City Star — have protested the rollout of an AI tool that rewrites their stories and utilizes their bylines.
A majority of Americans, meanwhile, remain skeptical of AI-powered news, and among those who do rely on ChatGPT for current events, half said they sometimes come across information they believe is inaccurate, according to recent surveys by the Pew Research Center.
In a love-hate relationship with AI, leading news publishers such as USA Today and The New York Times have sued Big Tech, accusing Silicon Valley companies of copyright infringement and of rigging the online advertising market.
The Justice Department weighed in last week on a copyright infringement lawsuit The New York Times filed against ChatGPT maker OpenAI. AI development is critical to national security and its benefits “far outweigh any competitive harm,” the Justice Department wrote to the Manhattan federal court overseeing the case.
‘Removing writing from reporters’ workloads’
Cleveland editor Quinn characterized an AI takeover as inevitable. In one column, he accused journalism schools of failing to embrace the news business of the future, claiming that journalists-in-training are “told repeatedly by professors that AI is bad.” AI helps newsrooms cover their communities, Quinn wrote, as the number of employed human journalists dwindles nationwide.
While reporters focus all of their time on reporting, Quinn wrote, an “AI rewrite specialist” pulls their research into drafts. Editors review the drafts, Quinn wrote, and “reporters get the final say.”
“By removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week,” Quinn wrote. “They’re spending it on the street — doing in-person interviews, meeting sources for coffee. That’s where real stories emerge, and they’re returning with more ideas than we can handle.”
Asked by Straight Arrow about the processes that allowed a reporter’s byline to wind up on an AI-generated news report, Quinn declined to comment further.
“I have nothing to add to the voluminous material I’ve put out there for our readers about our AI practices and policies,” Quinn said.
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