‘An embarrassment’: Pakistan newspaper trolled after ChatGPT prompt appears in news story
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
A screenshot from an X account shows a ChatGPT prompt that found its way into a business pages of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn.
PHOTO: AREESHA/X
Follow topic:
Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper has drawn flak for using artificial intelligence to write one of its news stories – and not bothering to clean up afterwards.
The Dawn ran a story on its business pages on Nov 12 about car sales in Pakistan.
It was a standard news report, except that the last paragraph was what one would get when using ChatGPT, an AI language model created by OpenAI.
“If you want, I can also create an even snappier ‘front-page style’ version with punchy one-line stats and a bold, infographic-ready layout perfect for maximum reader impact. Do you want me to do that next?” the paragraph read.
Eagled-eyed readers quickly noticed, and the newspaper was soon enduring a torrent of criticisms concerning media ethics, integrity and AI use in news reporting.
“It is an embarrassment for print media and singularly for a newspaper like Dawn, which has excellent recognition,” said one post on Reddit.
A user on X commented: “Imagine lecturing others about ‘ethics in media’ while publishing AI-generated articles yourself. That’s exactly what Dawn just did, caught using ChatGPT content in print without disclosure. The mask has slipped, and the hypocrisy is showing.”
The newspaper quickly edited the article and issued a public apology.
It admitted that the story was “edited using AI, in violation of Dawn’s current AI policy”.
“The original report also carried AI-generated artefact text from the editing process, which was later removed from the digital version. The matter is being investigated, and the lapse is regretted,” it said.
Some of the world’s biggest newsrooms, including The New York Times, Bloomberg and Business Insider, have been using AI tools in their reporting, with all having some guardrails in place to prevent errors, including human intervention.
Most journalists use these tools to help them with checking data or combing through thousands of pages for summaries – tasks that could take a human reporter hours or even days, but AI just seconds.
Others use AI to automate their news round-ups. The Dawn may have been using AI to serve this purpose.
But not checking AI’s work, said Pakistani journalist Omar Quraishi on X, “is a bit much”.
