The New York Times will no longer work with a book critic who admitted that he had used artificial intelligence in writing a review for the newspaper, the Guardian reports.
Alex Preston, author of This Bleeding City and The Revelations, who has also contributed to the Guardian and the Economist, reviewed Watching Over Her, written by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and translated by Frank Wynne, for the Times on Jan. 6. The piece bore similarities to a review of the same book by critic Christobel Kent for the Guardian.
On March 30, the newspaper attached an editor’s note to the review that reads, “A reader recently alerted the Times that this review included language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in the Guardian. We spoke to the author of this piece, a freelancer reviewer, who told us he used an AI tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove. His reliance on AI and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of the Times’s standards.”
Preston told the Guardian, “I made a serious mistake in using an AI tool on a draft review I had written, and I failed to identify and remove overlapping language from another review that the AI dropped in. I am hugely embarrassed by what happened and truly sorry. I took responsibility immediately and apologized to the New York Times, and I also want to apologize to Christobel Kent and to the Guardian.”
The incident comes less than two weeks after the publisher Hachette canceled the publication of a horror novel titled Shy Girl, written by Mia Ballard, after it was discovered that the book was edited using AI.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
