| Title | CNET Pushed Reporters to be More Favorable to Advertisers, Staffers Say | |
| Date | Saturday February 04 2023, @11:41PM | |
| Author | mrpg | |
| Topic | ||
| from the we-are-commited-to-help-us dept. | ||
After being acquired by Red Ventures, staff say editorial firewalls have been repeatedly breached:
Last October, CNET's parent company, Red Ventures, held a cross-department meeting to discuss the AI writing software it had been building for months. The tool had been in testing internally ahead of public use on CNET, and Red Ventures' early results revealed several potential issues.
[...] Red Ventures executives laid out all of these issues at the meeting and then made a fateful decision: CNET began publishing AI-generated stories anyway.
"They were well aware of the fact that the AI plagiarized and hallucinated," a person who attended the meeting recalls. (Artificial intelligence tools have a tendency to insert false information into responses, which are sometimes called "hallucinations.") "One of the things they were focused on when they developed the program was reducing plagiarism. I suppose that didn't work out so well."
[...] Multiple former employees told The Verge of instances where CNET staff felt pressured to change stories and reviews due to Red Ventures' business dealings with advertisers. The forceful pivot toward Red Ventures' affiliate marketing-driven business model — which generates revenue when readers click links to sign up for credit cards or buy products — began clearly influencing editorial strategy, with former employees saying that revenue objectives have begun creeping into editorial conversations.
Reporters, including on-camera video hosts, have been asked to create sponsored content, making staff uncomfortable with the increasingly blurry lines between editorial and sales. One person told The Verge that they were made aware of Red Ventures' business relationship with a company whose product they were covering and that they felt pressured to change a review to be more favorable.
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printed from SoylentNews, CNET Pushed Reporters to be More Favorable to Advertisers, Staffers Say on 2024-05-03 10:46:17