Hack Job If you’re going to use AI to write for you, and if you also happen to answer to an editor, don’t. It’s not just lazy, it’s plain stupid, because a keen reader can always sniff out the BS. Case in point: Aaron Pelczar, a green reporter at Wyoming newspaper the Cody Enterprise tried to get away with using AI to do his job — and now he’s out of one after a competitor exposed his fraud, The New York Times reports. Pelczar resigned on August 2, just two months after he started at the newspaper. Investigators discovered that he wasn’t just using a large language model to write the body of his articles, but to fabricate entire direct quotes, too, an egregious lapse of journalistic integrity in the age of AI. “There were some weird patterns and phrases that were in his reporting,” CJ Baker, a staff writer at rival local paper the Powell Tribune who broke the story, told the NYT. On the Scent Maybe a more conniving fraudster could’ve kept the charade up for longer. The fabricated quotes — which included those that claimed to be from government agencies and even the state’s governor — read stiffly, and according to Baker, sounded more like the stuff put in news releases than what a person would say aloud. And the thing about quotes is that they’re usually attributed to people. So Baker “went back and started checking on quotes that appeared in this reporter’s stories that had…Journalist Resigns After Being Exposed for Fake, AI-Generated Quotes