Mediahuis has temporarily suspended the former head of its Irish media wing from his current role with the publisher, after he “wrongly put words into people’s mouths” through the use of AI.<\/p>\n
Peter Vandermeersch served as chief executive of Mediahuis Ireland between 2022 and last year.<\/p>\n
The media group oversees the Irish Independent, Sunday Independent and a variety of other national and regional titles.<\/p>\n
Mr Vandermeersch also served as Editor-in-Chief of NRC Media in the Netherlands for nine years.<\/p>\n
A piece of investigative journalism published by NRC led to Mr Vandermeersch admitting he used AI language models such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Notebook while writing for the ‘Press and Democracy’ title on the Substack platform.<\/p>\n
NRC states that 15 of the 53 blog posts Mr Vandermeersch wrote contain quotes that cannot be found in the publications he claimed to have sourced them from.<\/p>\n
The Dutch publication said that seven of the quoted individuals confirmed that they did not make the statements attributed to them by Mr Vandermeersch.<\/p>\n
In a statement published today, titled ‘I am admitting my mistake’, Mr Vandermeersch writes:<\/p>\n
“Even I – with all my years of experience and knowledge – fell into the trap of hallucinations. I summarised reports using AI tools and worked from those summaries, trusting they were accurate.<\/p>\n
“In doing so, I wrongly put words into people’s mouths, when I should have presented them as paraphrases. In some cases, it reflected my interpretation of their words. That was not just careless – it was wrong”<\/p>\n
“It is particularly painful that I made precisely the mistake I have repeatedly warned colleagues about: these language models are so good that they produce irresistible quotes you are tempted to use as an author.<\/p>\n
“Of course, I should have verified them. The necessary ‘human oversight,’ which I consistently advocate, fell short.”<\/p>\n
He adds: “One more point about transparency: I made a second mistake. When I knew that some quotes were incorrect, I should have corrected them immediately. Instead, NRC did so in my place.<\/p>\n
“Together with Mediahuis I decided to temporarily suspend my activities as Fellow ‘Journalism and Society’.”<\/p>\n
Mr Vandermeersch regularly writes about the AI industry and journalism, with his previous article, published on 13 March, covering the topic of AI companies using copyrighted work without consent or compensation.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Mediahuis group CEO Gert Ysebaert confirmed it had temporarily suspended Mr Vandermeersch from his role as Fellow with the organisation.<\/p>\n
“This should never have happened,” Mr Ysebaert said.<\/p>\n
“At Mediahuis, we apply strict rules for the use of AI, where diligence, human oversight and transparency are essential.<\/p>\n
“The fact that these principles were not followed runs counter to the standards we uphold and to our commitment to readers that we stand for reliable journalism.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mediahuis has temporarily suspended the former head of its Irish media wing from his current role with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-486127","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}