Wave of Phony News Quotes Affects Everyone—Including EFF

Whether due to generative AI hallucinations or human sloppiness, the internet is increasingly rife with bogus news content—and you can count EFF among the victims. 

WinBuzzer published a story June 26 with the headline, “Microsoft Is Getting Sued over Using Nearly 200,000 Pirated Books for AI Training,” containing this passage: 

That quotation from EFF’s Corynne McSherry was cited again in two subsequent, related stories by the same journalist—one published July 27, the other August 27. 

But the link in that original June 26 post was fake. Corynne McSherry never wrote such an article, and the quote was bogus. 

Interestingly, we noted a similar issue with a June 13 post by the same journalist, in which he cited work by EFF Director of Cybersecurity Eva Galperin; this quote included the phrase “get-out-of-jail-free card” too. 

Again, the link he inserted leads nowhere because Eva Galperin never wrote such a blog or white paper.  

When EFF reached out, the journalist—WinBuzzer founder and editor-in-chief Markus Kasanmascheff—acknowledged via email that the quotes were bogus. 

“This indeed must be a case of AI slop. We are using AI tools for research/source analysis/citations. I sincerely apologize for that and this is not the content quality we are aiming for,” he wrote. “I myself have noticed that in the particular case of the EFF for whatever reason non-existing quotes are manufactured. This usually does not happen and I have taken the necessary measures to avoid this in the future. Every single citation and source mention must always be double checked. I have been doing this already but obviously not to the required level. 

“I am actually manually editing each article and using AI for some helping tasks. I must have relied too much on it,” he added. 

AI slop abounds 

It’s not an isolated incident. Media companies large and small are using AI to generate news content because it’s cheaper than paying for journalists’ salaries, but that savings can come at the cost of the outlets’ reputations.  

The U.K.’s Press Gazette reported last month that Wired and Business Insider had to remove news features written by one freelance journalist after concerns the articles are likely AI-generated works of fiction: “Most of the published stories contained case studies of named people whose details Press Gazette was unable to verify online, casting doubt on whether any of the quotes or facts contained in the articles are real.” 

And back in May, the Chicago Sun-Times had to apologize after publishing an AI-generated list of books that would make good summer reads—with 10 of the 15 recommended book descriptions and titles found to be “false, or invented out of whole cloth.” 

As journalist Peter Sterne wrote for Nieman Lab in 2022: 

Another potential risk of relying on large language models to write news articles is the potential for the AI to insert fake quotes. Since the AI is not bound by the same ethical standards as a human journalist, it may include quotes from sources that do not actually exist, or even attribute fake quotes to real people. This could lead to false or misleading reporting, which could damage the credibility of the news organization. It will be important for journalists and newsrooms to carefully fact check any articles written with the help of AI, to ensure the accuracy and integrity of their reporting. 

(Or did he write that? Sterne disclosed in that article that he used OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 to generate that paragraph, ironically enough.) 

The Radio Television Digital News Association issued guidelines a few years ago for the use of AI in journalism, and the Associated Press is among many outlets that have developed guidelines of their own. The Poynter Institute offers a template for developing such policies.  

Nonetheless, some journalists or media outlets have been caught using AI to generate stories including fake quotes; for example, the Associated Press reported last year that a Wyoming newspaper reporter had filed at least seven stories that included AI-generated quotations from six people.  

WinBuzzer wasn’t the only outlet to falsely quote EFF this year. An April 19 article in Wander contained another bogus quotation from Eva Galperin: 

An email to the outlet demanding the article’s retraction went unanswered. 

In another case, WebProNews published a July 24 article quoting Eva Galperin under the headline “Risika Data Breach Exposes 100M Swedish Records to Fraud Risks,” but Eva confirmed she’d never spoken with them or given that quotation to anyone. The article no longer seems to exist on the outlet’s own website, but it was captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. 

A request for comment made through WebProNews’ “Contact Us” page went unanswered, and then they did it again on September 2, this time misattributing a statement to Corynne McSherry: 

No such article in The Verge seems to exist, and the statement is not at all in line with EFF’s stance. 

Our most egregious example 

The top prize for audacious falsity goes to a June 18 article in the Arabian Post, since removed from the site after we flagged it to an editor. The Arabian Post is part of the Hyphen Digital Network, which describes itself as “at the forefront of AI innovation” and offering “software solutions that streamline workflows to focus on what matters most: insightful storytelling.” The article in question included this passage: 

Privacy advocate Linh Nguyen from the Electronic Frontier Foundation remarked that community monitoring tools are playing a civic role, though she warned of the potential for misinformation. “Crowdsourced neighbourhood policing walks a thin line—useful in forcing transparency, but also vulnerable to misidentification and fear-mongering,” she noted in a discussion on digital civil rights. 

Nobody at EFF recalls anyone named Linh Nguyen ever having worked here, nor have we been able to find anyone by that name who works in the digital privacy sector. So not only was the quotation fake, but apparently the purported source was, too.  

Now, EFF is all about having our words spread far and wide. Per our copyright policy, any and all original material on the EFF website may be freely distributed at will under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY), unless otherwise noted. 

But we don’t want AI and/or disreputable media outlets making up words for us. False quotations that misstate our positions damage the trust that the public and more reputable media outlets have in us. 

If you’re worried about this (and rightfully so), the best thing a news consumer can do is invest a little time and energy to learn how to discern the real from the fake. It’s unfortunate that it’s the public’s burden to put in this much effort, but while we’re adjusting to new tools and a new normal, a little effort now can go a long way.  

As we’ve noted before in the context of election misinformation, the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica has published a handy guide about how to tell if what you’re reading is accurate or “fake news.” And the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions infographic on How to Spot Fake News is a quick and easy-to-read reference you can share with friends: