Earlier this month, as Aftermath first reported, the G/O Media-owned business news website Quartzquietly started churning out a huge number of AI-generated news articles. Surprise: its news bot is already publishing outrageous errors.For example, the publication's AI-powered "Quartz Intelligence Newsroom" byline pushed out an article yesterday confidently declaring that NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have now been stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) for months due to the extraordinary failure of Boeing's Starliner, are still in space because their mission was intentionally "prolonged" so they could conduct maintenance on the ISS."Their mission, originally intended for a shorter duration, was prolonged to accommodate a series of crucial maintenance tasks outside the ISS," reads the AI-generated news hit.As anyone with a passing interest in NASA or the private space sector knows, this is completelyand utterly wrong.Though Williams and Wilmore, who were originally meant to be in space for about a week, are assisting other ISS crewmates with research and maintenance spacewalks, their many-months-longer-than-expected stay wasn't at all intentional.Instead, their return has been repeatedly postponed because of colossal failures on Boeing's behalf. In short, their protracted ISS visit wasn't necessary for "maintenance tasks." It's all the result of a massive Boeing screwup that stranded two humans in orbit.But you wouldn't know that from Quartz's AI-generated article, which completely bungles the facts of the astronauts' situation and incredibly ignores Boeing's central role in the debacle entirely.Even the headline of the AI-generated article, "The Boeing Starliner astronauts took their first spacewalk," is incorrect. Yes, the duo conducted their first spacewalk together yesterday. But both astronauts are spacewalk veterans. Williams, in fact, set the new record as the woman with the most minutes in the vacuum of space on this most recent adventure; she even took part in a previous spacewalk to conduct maintenance on the ISS just two weeks ago.In addition to all that blatantly inaccurate information, there are subtler errors in the article as well.Each Quartz AI post includes a list of citations at the very top, which in theory provides important context for readers. But instead, the bot mangles the credit by saying the piece "incorporates reporting" from a person named "Bill McEwen," linking back to a website called GV Wire. And while there is a Bill McEwen listed as an editor of GV Wire, the article itself is actually by theAssociated Press meaning it's the AP's reporting,which should have been given the credit, instead of slapping the name of a random employee on it. (That AP article, by the way, seems to be where the error about the "first" spacewalk came from; the Quartz AI basically stole it and took out the word "together," rendering it no longer accurate.)In other words, from top to bottom, this article is a confident-sounding mess of AI slop. And though the website does include a wretched disclaimer at the foot of each AI-spun article noting that the AI is "experimental" and will probably make mistakes, it forces the question: what purpose does this thing really serve that doesn't outweigh the reputational harm it's incurring?In reality, it's obviously a traffic play. G/O's executives want clicks, and they don't care if they're spreading blatant misinformation to get them. In their mind, throwing other people's journalism into a woodchipper and publishing whatever paraphrased chum comes out the other side is a viable business strategy.If that sounds unfair, remember that this is just the latest of many attempts by G/O to push AI products onto its various websites, which have repeatedly ended in preventable, embarrassing errors and incurred rage by the company's human journalists. As those human employees have made very clear, the staff at G/O publications want to do journalism and, in turn, do right by readers.We reached to G/O Media with questions, but haven't heard back.Share This Article