The Atlantic's Matteo Wong just did an article on an Italian newspaper editor besotted with and deluded by ChatGPT

[highplainsdem]

Not that Wong described him that way, but unless you're also besotted/deluded, it's impossible to miss what's really going on with his "experiment" with ChatGPT.

Two long paragraphs illustrate the problems.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/06/il-foglio-claudio-cerasa-ai/683158/

Several major publications, including The Atlantic, have entered into corporate partnerships with OpenAI and other AI firms. Any number of experiments have ensued—publishers have used the software to help translate work into different languages, draft headlines, and write summaries or even articles. But perhaps no publication has gone further than the Italian newspaper Il Foglio. For one month, beginning in late March, Il Foglio printed a daily insert consisting of four pages of AI-written articles and headlines. Each day, Il Foglio’s top editor, Claudio Cerasa, asked ChatGPT Pro to write articles on various topics—Italian politics, J. D. Vance, AI itself. Two humans reviewed the outputs for mistakes, sometimes deciding to leave in minor errors as evidence of AI’s fallibility and, at other times, asking ChatGPT to rewrite an article. The insert, titled Il Foglio AI, was almost immediately covered by newspapers around the world. “It’s impossible to hide AI,” Cerasa told me recently. “And you have to understand that it’s like the wind; you have to manage it.”

Now the paper—which circulates about 29,000 copies each day, in addition to serving its online readership—plans to embrace AI-written content permanently, issuing a weekly AI section and, on occasion, using ChatGPT to write articles for the standard paper. (These articles will always be labeled.) Cerasa has already used the technology to generate fictional debates, such as an imagined conversation between a conservative and a progressive cardinal on selecting a new pope; a review of the columnist Beppe Severgnini’s latest book, accompanied by Severgnini’s AI-written retort; the chatbot’s advice on what to do if you suspect you’re falling in love with a chatbot (“Do not fall in love with me”); and an interview with Cerasa himself, conducted by ChatGPT.

Cerasa deliberately misrepresented how well ChatGPT worked:

Two humans reviewed the outputs for mistakes, sometimes deciding to leave in minor errors as evidence of AI’s fallibility and, at other times, asking ChatGPT to rewrite an article.

That's effectively fraud, if you give the chatbot mulligans to correct the disastrous errors, but leave in minor ones as examples of its failures. Just as it would be fraud if, say, you rewrote large portions of a Trump speech to make him sound rational and intelligent, but left in a minor grammatical error or two so people wouldn't think it was heavily edited.

Cerasa has already used the technology to generate fictional debates, such as an imagined conversation between a conservative and a progressive cardinal on selecting a new pope; a review of the columnist Beppe Severgnini’s latest book, accompanied by Severgnini’s AI-written retort; the chatbot’s advice on what to do if you suspect you’re falling in love with a chatbot (“Do not fall in love with me”); and an interview with Cerasa himself, conducted by ChatGPT.

As evidence that ChatGPT has Cerasa besotted/deluded, this is pretty strong.

As journalism, it's pathetic. Self-indulgent. He's jerking around. Entertaining himself with what a chatbot "thinks" when he should know damn well that the chatbot doesn't think and can give endless different responses to the same prompt.

I see that same sort of thing when anyone posts online that they've asked what ChatGPT or Grok or any other chatbot "has to say" about something. Intellectually, those people are jerking around, not offering their own thoughts or those from another human they quote, but just amusing themselves and imagining they're entertaining others with words regurgitated mindlessly by a machine. I saw it on Twitter the other night when countless people thought they HAD to ask Grok whether Musk had posted a quickly deleted message to Stephen Miller about taking his wife, and Grok obliged in typical chatbot fashion with well-written and individual but often completely contradictory answers posted seconds apart if not at exactly the same time.

Because chatbots can write, following algorithms, but they can't think.

It's bad enough when people posting on social media are this besotted/deluded. And ideally no one takes their stupid posts seriously, though they are harming forums by posting AI slop as their own or anyone's actual thoughts.

But it's a professional fail when an editor is doing this. What Cerasa is doing would be an embarrassment for any professional writer. And for a newspaper editor, it's an abandonment of his responsibility to his readers.

And that's on top of the Everest-size problem of ChatGPT having been trained on stolen intellectual property, a problem which no ethical person should ever overlook.

[madville]

1. What happens when AI

Is the only thing reading the AI generated articles?

YouTube and Facebook are so full of AI generated crap now it’s harder and harder to find real content.

[highplainsdem]

2. Zuckerberg is apparently fine with AI slop on Facebook. 404 Media reported last year that not just

many of the OPs were AI slop, but many of the replies were apparently from bots, and Zuckerberg wants Facebook's human users to create AI friends to interact with there. I don't use Facebook myself but there are so many news stories about how bad it's getting.

I've personally noticed YouTube filling with AI slop. All too often when I'm watching a real human-made video with real humans, I'll glance at the other videos YT is recommending on that page and many if not most of them are AI garbage.

[madville]

3. Space documentaries on YT

Are out of control with AI garbage. Hard to find anything new that’s real.

[Kid Berwyn]

4. Appreciate the heads-up and the warning labels.

Perhaps soon only the AI will be reading AI-generated content.

[highplainsdem]

5. It would be best not to use it at all.