The New York Times Got Caught Using Al Hallucinations in Its Reporting

We're getting to the point where you're almost better off getting on your news off some random YouTuber, rather than these supposedly esteemed and prestigious news outlets.

Last month, the New York Times published an article about Prime Minister Mark Carney securing a majority government. In the article, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre is quoted denouncing the members of his party who had crossed the floor to join Carney’s Liberals. “If these turncoats have any shred of integrity left, they should resign their seats tonight and run in a by-election tomorrow,” the paper reported Poilievre saying in a speech in March.

Except Poilievre never said that. Quietly, more than two weeks later, a correction was added at the bottom of the article noting that it had been updated “after the Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The reporter should have checked the accuracy of what the A.I. tool returned.”

That reporter was Matina Stevis-Gridneff, the New York Times’ Canada bureau chief, and it appears her error was flagged not by editors but by a keen-eyed reader named Iris, who replied to Stevis-Gridneff’s Bluesky post on April 15, the day after the article had been published, to ask where the quote came from. “I have looked up the speeches he gave in March and can’t find him saying this,” Iris wrote.

'Member when all the liberals were glazing the New York Times simply because Trump called it "the failing New York Times" so they felt the need to get subscriptions to help the newspaper *checks notes... prioritize conservative voices and pave the way for a second Trump presidency.

Pepperidge Farm 'Members.

The Times is worse than ever. I think october 7 and it's aftermath broke their brain. And or their editors and or owners are on the epstein files.

Fabrications used to be a mortal sin in journalism. The New York Times’ own Jayson Blair left the paper in 2003 under a dark cloud of scandal after it was revealed he had regularly invented details for his reporting. The flagrant fabrications of Stephen Glass at The New Republic in the late 1990s were sufficiently scandalous enough to merit a Vanity Fair feature and a Hollywood film adaptation. But the minimizing treatment of Stevis-Gridneff’s fake Poilievre quote suggests that in the AI era, fabrication may no longer be a career-ending transgression—at least, not for everyone.

We hold AI content to the same standards — except, it's so easy not to we don't reeeeely bother about mistakes.

And down they go

The New York Times is one of the most widely read papers on the planet

Wut. Citation needed. It's authwalled. We can't even read it.