Fakta ja fiktio on pidettävä journalismissa erillään, kirjoittaa Kreeta Karvala.

Aamulehti päätti perjantaina poistaa verkosta 551 lehden entisen toimittajan, Matti Kuuselan, juttua sen jälkeen, kun hän oli kirjassaan paljastanut kirjoittaneensa kolmeen juttuunsa mukaan sepitteitä.

–Minulla oli joskus nuorempana tapana käyttää vähän mielikuvitusta ja huvitusta ja sujauttaa asiallisen jutun sisään hyväntahtoista fiktiota, Kuusela kertoo Journalisti – toisenlainen toimittaja -kirjassaan.

Remember last year, when we reported that the Red Ventures-owned CNET had been quietly publishing dozens of AI-generated articles that turned out to be filled with errors and plagiarism?

The revelation kicked off a fiery debate about the future of the media in the era of AI — as well as an equally passionate discussion among editors of Wikipedia, who needed to figure out how to treat CNET content going forward.

“CNET, usually regarded as an ordinary tech [reliable source], has started experimentally running AI-generated articles, which are riddled with errors,” a Wikipedia editor named David Gerard wrote to kick off a January 2023 discussion thread in Wikipedia’s Reliable Sources forum, where editors convene to decide whether a given source is trustworthy enough for editors to cite.

“So far the experiment is not going down well, as it shouldn’t,” Gerard continued, warning that “any of these articles that make it into a Wikipedia article need to be removed.”

The brutal police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, has prompted one of the greatest civil uprisings of the modern day. In the weeks following Floyd’s death, the conversation around diversity and inclusion, as well as tech’s role in upholding white supremacy, has returned to the forefront.

Facebook has begun labeling content produced by media outlets it says are under state control, enacting a policy the social network first announced in October.

Pages and posts from at least 18 outlets including Russia Today, China’s People’s Daily and Iran’s Press TV now carry notices to users that they are “state-controlled media.” Ads from state-controlled publishers will also be labeled starting later this year. The labels will initially be shown to U.S. Facebook users and roll out to other countries over time.

Conspiracy theories claiming a connection between 5G technology and the coronavirus have been around since the pandemic’s early days, and apparently they’re still going strong.

So strong, in fact, that Twitter began applying a label to some tweets about COVID-19 and 5G, encouraging users to “get the facts” about the virus. As Business Insider reported, clicking through the label leads to a page collecting sources debunking claims with links to pages like the BBC and Snopes. Earlier this year, the conspiracy was linked to a series ofarson attacks on 5G towers.

A good trade journalist often has an advantage in fact-gathering against mainstream colleagues, whose attention is necessarily stretched over a wider range of industries, topics and territories.

Dave Barry stated the dilemma ironically: “We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics. This is how we stay objective.”

I write for EET because I trust its journalists, who are among the best — among many — with whom I’ve worked throughout in my checkered career.