As the use of AI in publishing grows, one prominent tech news company is discovering the hard way that the technology has a long way to go. CNET, a renowned technology news website, has included an editor's disclaimer to all of its AI-written pieces, informing readers that the publication is checking the stories for accuracy and will provide corrections if errors are discovered. This is because CNET was informed that at least one of the machine-written financial explainers it had published included significant errors.
CNET's editor-in-chief, Connie Guglielmo, stated in a recent post that the business has produced about 75 pieces on basic financial themes since November 2020 as a test to determine if AI can be employed in newsrooms and other information-based services in the next months and years. Human editors must, however, extensively fact-check AI-generated pieces, as Futurism recently reported.
Futurism examined one of the articles Guglielmo mentioned in her post, "What Is Compound Interest?" and discovered a number of severe inaccuracies. While the page has now been updated, the original version had errors in detailing loan interest rate payments as well as other details.
The mistakes that Futurism found show the main problem with AI text generators today: they may be able to answer in a way that sounds like a human, but they still have trouble sorting out inconsistencies. However, this should not deter the use of AI in publishing, since the technology is bound to evolve and has the potential to generate excellent and valuable information more efficiently in the future.
Source: Engadget