The New York Times severs ties with freelance journalist over AI use in book review

A freelance journalist who wrote a book review for The New York Times has been dropped by the broadsheet, after he admitted to using artificial intelligence (AI) to help write the piece, British daily The Guardian reported.

Six-time author Alex Preston’s review of the novel Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea was published online in January and in print the following month, and appeared to lift elements from a review of the same book in The Guardian.

A reader alerted The New York Times that the piece by Mr Preston, who wrote six reviews for the paper between 2021 and 2026, “included language and details similar to those in a review of the same book” published in The Guardian in August 2025.

In an editors’ note appended to Mr Preston’s review and dated March 30, The New York Times said it had spoken to the author who admitted that he “used an AI tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove”.

“His reliance on AI and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of The Times’ standards,” read the note.

“The reviewer said he had not used AI in his previous reviews for The Times, and we have found no issues in those pieces.”

In a March 31 article, The Guardian reported that it was alerted by The New York Times to the “overlap” in an e-mail sent on March 30.

A spokesperson for the Manhattan-based newspaper told the British daily that Mr Preston would no longer write for the paper.

Language that appeared to be lifted from The Guardian’s review by author and literary critic Christobel Kent included descriptions of characters and closing summaries of the book.

For example, a character who was described as a “lazy Machiavellian Stefano” in The Guardian review was called a “lazy, Machiavellian Stefano” in The New York Times piece.

The conclusions of both reviews were also similar.

The Guardian review described the book as “most significantly a song of love to a country of contradictions, battered, war-torn, divided, misguided and miraculous: an Italy where life is costume and the performance of art, and where circuses spring up on wasteland”.

In contrast, The New York Times review says the book’s characters “populate what is ultimately a love song to a country of contradictions: battered, divided, misguided and miraculous. This is an Italy where life is performance, where circuses rise on wasteland”.

In a statement to The Guardian, Mr Preston said: “I made a serious mistake in using an AI tool on a draft review I had written, and I failed to identify and remove overlapping language from another review that the AI dropped in.

“I am hugely embarrassed by what happened and truly sorry. I took responsibility immediately and apologised to The New York Times, and I also want to apologise to Christobel Kent and to The Guardian.”