How AI Use Might Be Ruining Good Newspapers

I suspect The Toronto Star, an award-winning newspaper, is highly dependent upon AI for proofreading, copy editing, and fact checking.

Lately I've noticed a lot more spelling errors. Sometimes they're even in big bold type: headlines. 

Also I've seen homonyms misused. These are real words that sound the same as what should be there, but spelled incorrectly in that context.

Sometimes words are missing in a sentence.

 All of these errors cause me to slow down, reread, and fill in the blanks correctly.

But worst of all is the lack of fact checking, which I only noticed in a recent travel article which referenced the movie, Roman Holiday. The article was delightfully written, but contained a mistake about the stars of the movie. Gregory Peck, not Robert Mitchum, starred with Audrey Hepburn. 

A correctly spelled but wrong actor's name was printed. 

And that means that no human was proofreading or fact checking! 

It seems likely that the newspaper has replaced its copy editors and fact checkers with some equivalent of spell check. That is unacceptable for a good newspaper. 

Because it's not very serious to misremember an actor in a film. But what about the facts that I don't notice because I don't know the subject?