The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn’t going very well. There have been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely avoidable mess.

Earlier this year, we noted how Politico was among the major media companies rushing to embrace AI without really thinking things through or ensuring the technology actually works first. They’ve implemented “AI” systems –without transparently informing staff — that generate articles rife with all sorts of gibberish and falsehoods (this Brian Merchant post is a must read to understand the scope).

Politico management also recently introduced another AI “report builder” for premium Politico PRO subscribers that’s supposed to offer a breakdown of existing Politico reporter analysis of complicated topics. But here too the automation constantly screws up, conflating politicians and generating all sorts of errors that, for some incoherent reason, aren’t competently reviewed by Politico editors.

Don’t do this to your pub.