The company behind news outlets like Gizmodo and The AV Club came under fire from staff, the union and journalists this week after rolling out artificial intelligence (AI) generated articles filled with blatant falsehoods and haphazardly written sentences. …

Luke Plunkett, a senior writer for Kotaku, called the article a “simply staggering degree of pointlessness” with repetitive sentences that read like an eight-year-old wrote it.

“It’s WILDLY inaccurate. Just complete dogs–t. Even straight up plagiarizing Forbes’ list would have been preferable, because at least then the numbers would have been right,” he added. …

In an internal Slack message to staff, G/O Editorial Director Merrill Brown announced that AV Club, Gizmodo, Takeout and Deadspin had begun “limited testing” on AI-generated content, acknowledging the decision could be “contentious” for some.

[Yikes. AI might be good for some things — I use it to get instant transcriptions from my Zoom-based podcasts — but it’s not even close to being good enough to generate truly original content. G/O is fortunate that the derivate nature of AI didn’t expose them to significant liabilities for copyright infringement and plagiarism. What a truly stupid idea. — Ed]