In January 2023 the technology site Futurism revealed that CNET, a well-known consumer tech publication, had been quietly publishing financial explainer articles written by an AI tool. The stories ran under the byline “CNET Money Staff,” and readers had to hover over that byline to discover a note that the article was produced “using automation technology.” Futurism’s reporting showed the practice had been going on for months, with dozens of articles published before it came to public attention.
The reporting prompted scrutiny of the articles’ accuracy, and the problems went beyond disclosure. CNET ultimately corrected a large share of the AI-written stories, with its editor-in-chief acknowledging that errors had been found in many of them, some of them substantial, including a flawed explanation of how compound interest works. CNET paused the program and revised its disclosure practices, while saying it still intended to use AI tools in some form.
The episode became an early cautionary tale of the generative-AI era in journalism: not that AI was used, but that it was used without clear disclosure and without adequate fact-checking. It showed how plausible-sounding machine text can carry confident errors, and how hiding AI authorship erodes reader trust once exposed. For a general reader, CNET is the case study in why transparency and human review are not optional when machines write the news.