The editorial team at Mississippi Free Press discovered on Thursday that an opinion column we published on April 7 was written using artificial intelligence and that the “author” was not who they claimed to be. We have replaced the column with an editor’s note and purged the author from our system.
Artificial intelligence has become incredibly sophisticated in a short amount of time. The line between cutting-edge and bleeding-edge technology is practically nonexistent when it comes to these highly advanced supercomputers.
As Voices editor, I’m responsible for managing the wide variety of writers who reach out to us and who want to share their writing and their stories, whether paid or unpaid. Ninety-nine percent of the writers I’ve worked with since starting last September have, in my opinion, furthered this mission. I think about Sharon Leslie Morgan, who reached out to me late last year and asked to write about her decision to spend the last years of her life in Mississippi, researching the history of her enslaved ancestors in Noxubee County. Morgan died earlier this year.
The AI column submitted by this author didn’t seem out of the ordinary. In fact, it wasn’t until they submitted an invoice that didn’t match their name that I grew suspicious. Not of the column itself, but of the author. Was this person who they claimed to be?
It turns out that, no, they weren’t. I looked back at our email correspondence and checked out the various social media links they had provided in their email signature. All were dead or nonexistent. I searched their name with a company listed on their résumé and found an editor who had already gone through the same song-and-dance with the writer, though he figured out the ruse before he published a fake article. On closer inspection, it turns out that the headshot the writer sent us for his bio picture was also generated with AI. Soon after, I examined other recent voices columns we had received from new authors—and discovered a raft of AI-generated columns from fake authors with other names that all appeared to come from outside the country. Thankfully, we didn’t publish any of those.
Our expectation at the Mississippi Free Press for our reporters—and when I write, that includes me—is that all the words we publish are our own, that our quotes are true and the information we submit is verifiable. That extends to our opinion columnists. Journalism is different from writing. When the Mississippi Free Press publishes a story or a column, it comes with a higher level of credibility than what you may see on social media or an independent blog post.
Part of maintaining that credibility is being transparent when we make a mistake. In this instance, the mistake was mine. Lesson learned as an editor. Because of what I’ve learned through this experience, I’ve pulled three future columns because I noticed similar signs.
It’s unfortunate that I have to treat new writers with this level of suspicion, but that is the world we live in and the adjustment I will make. It’s easy to suggest just throwing a column in an AI detector, but AI detectors aren’t very reliable. And we aren’t the only news outlet confronting this issue.
Our newsroom is fully aware of the threats of AI, and News Editor Ashton Pittman has been working on a formal artificial intelligence policy for our organization that we will make public soon. But an ongoing concern is the increased sophistication of these large-language models. Will there come a point where AI writing is indistinguishable from human writing? Or a time that most published writing has no real writer’s voice and authenticity? That will not happen at the Mississippi Free Press where we believe every great writer has a unique voice and work to bring that out in our reporter team and freelancers alike.
For now, we are working to take solid steps to raise our level of scrutiny to prevent this from happening again. In addition to our artificial intelligence policy, we are organizing AI training to help our team better detect its usage, boosting writing quality standards for opinions and tightening revisions, focusing on recruiting freelance writers through local networks and placing a greater emphasis on Mississippi-based topics. We have plenty of writers who have met this standard before. The goal is to have future writers meet or exceed that expectation.
We also want to emphasize voices—not just the name of our opinion section, but the voices that share the stories you read about. If you look in our archives, you can see a wide variety of submissions. From essays to rigorously researched columns, you can see there is heart to these columns. We want to bring people, their stories and their words to our table. And in our newsroom, that will be done without the use of artificial intelligence.
To submit an original Voices column, email voices@mississippifreepress.org.
