Gannett’s ‘AI’ Scandals Result In Closure Of Wirecutter-esque Review Website, Layoffs

You might recall how Gannett, which owns USAToday (and probably the half-assed remains of whatever’s left of your town’s local newspaper), spent much of last year mired in a major “AI” scandal. Company executives apparently thought it would be a good idea to use half-cooked automation to create fake journalists and lazy clickbait without telling employees this was happening.

It… didn’t go well. Readers were quick to point out that as with other efforts of this type at CNET and Microsoft, the resulting “journalism” was badly done, prone to plagiarism, and full of errors. But company executives last December were also accused of using AI to create fake reviews favorable to the company’s advertising partners, which is kind of a thing now as what’s left of U.S. journalism ethics disintegrates.

Now Gannett has apparently announced that the Wirecutter-esque tech review website at the heart of the scandal, Reviewed, will be shutting down, resulting in an untold number of layoffs:

“After careful consideration and evaluation of our Reviewed business, we have decided to close the operation. We extend our sincere gratitude to our employees who have provided consumers with trusted product reviews,” Reviewed spokesperson Lark-Marie Antón told The Verge in an email.

Yeah, whoops a daisy.

For what it’s worth, Gannett CEO Michael E. Reed, where this particular buck stops, made nearly $4 million in compensation last year.

The third-party company Gannett used to create shitty fake clickbait “journalism,” AdVon Commerce, has been at the heart of other similar scandals at places like Sports Illustrated. Their penalty so far for a complete lack of ethics has included cozy new ad partnerships with giants like Google. The Verge had a really good profile of Advon last July that’s well worth a read.

The fail-upward brunchlords who have taken over what’s left of U.S. journalism don’t care about journalism. Or product quality, audience, or workers. They care about making temporary, badly-automated, low-quality clickbait engagement machines that effectively shit money. They don’t see AI as a way to improve productivity or reduce administrative burdens, but as a way to lazily cut corners and undermine human labor.

These folks are not only filling the internet with untrustworthy garbage, they’re misdirecting ad revenues away from outlets doing actual journalism and quality analysis and writing. That’s driving journalists and editors away from large, increasingly-mismanaged companies and toward direct-to-consumer newsletters and smaller, independently owned outlets that may not be able to compete at scale with the growing number of ethics-optional AI bullshit machines being born on a daily basis.