Cleveland.com Dabbling in AI-Written Articles

Coverage on Cleveland.com has in recent weeks included rote local news such as the Cleveland Public Library extending its floral exhibit into August , Cuyahoga Valley National Park announcing a sister-park relationship with Dartmoor in the UK , and the lineup for a Bedford summer concert series.

Those articles would not seem out of place given the tenor and subjects and in no way remarkable until and unless a reader scanned all the way to the bottom of the pieces where one would find the following note: " Generative AI was used to produce an initial draft of this story, which was reviewed and edited by Advance Media staff."

Newsrooms small and large have begun to embrace artificial intelligence in various ways in an effort to maximize slim staffs and resources amid a challenging economic landscape, tapping into new and emerging tech tools to better target audiences and fine-tune coverage. Largely, this happens invisibly. Editors query ChatGPT to workshop a headline or gather suggestions on story structure. Reporters ask AI to gather information far quicker than they would otherwise be able to do on their own.

An Associated Press poll earlier this year reported that 70% of newsrooms are deploying AI in some capacity , "using the technology for crafting social media posts, newsletters and headlines; translation and transcribing interviews; and story drafts, among other uses. One-fifth said they’d used generative AI for multimedia, including social graphics and videos."

A few have jumped more willingly into an area of generative AI that has rankled and worried consumers -- engaging it to write wholesale articles.

As Cleveland.com editor Chris Quinn wrote in a column in February 2023 , summarizing his experience with having AI write an article on the highs and lows of Bibb's performance as mayor thus far, the results when asked to gather details from a wide swath of primary sources and to make editorial judgments have thus far proved lacking.

But that's not what's appeared so far on Cleveland.com. These are niche local news stories being lightly (we're being generous here) rewritten by AI. There are no angles, no opinions, no complications. And what's been published is readable and clean and, in some cases, miles better than other soft-news rewrites that appear on the site and are even less dissimilar from the source material.

So while the instinct for some will be to outright criticize or joke that the assumption is Cleveland.com has been written by AI for years, the practice is hardly isolated or worthy of condemnation.

Quinn didn't respond to a request for comment from Scene, but in that February 2023 column he wrote: "I would love an AI tool that could handle some of the more tedious parts of our profession. A tool that could examine property sales and produce a basic report summarizing the latest trend would save us time, freeing up our reporters to do the deeper work that AI tools cannot... For now, though, the AI tools are not close to being ready, even if they would delight some of our readers for always being grammatical and containing none of the typos some of you write frequently to note."

To Cleveland.com's credit, the articles in question, which come under a "Staff Reports" byline, are clearly labled, albeit at the end, as being produced by AI. And, they are, so far, targeted to minor news announcements. Nothing comparable to the controversy that have previously engulfed CNET, Sports Illustrated, G/O Media and other outlets that neither fact-checked AI articles nor were transparent in how they were produced.

The local experiment comes at a time of heightened public wariness of AI in media, as concerns about misinformation and disinformation in political reporting ahead of the election run high alongside myriad and comical examples of generative artifical intelligence scouring the internet for information only to return the most absurd and wrong answers.

A recent Reuters poll found that 52% of U.S. respondents and 63% of UK respondents are uncomfortable with AI-written articles . Those numbers improve when asked if AI-written articles on soft news topics with an additional layer of human supervision and editing were acceptable.

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