Earlier this month, as Aftermath first reported, the G/O Media-owned business news website Quartz quietly started churning out a huge number of AI-generated news articles. Surprise: its news bot is already publishing outrageous errors. For example, the publication’s AI-powered “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom” byline pushed out an article yesterday confidently declaring that NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have now been stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) for months due to the extraordinary failure of Boeing’s Starliner, are still in space because their mission was intentionally “prolonged” so they could conduct maintenance on the ISS. “Their mission, originally intended for a shorter duration, was prolonged to accommodate a series of crucial maintenance tasks outside the ISS,” reads the AI-generated news hit. As anyone with a passing interest in NASA or the private space sector knows, this is completely and utterly wrong. Though Williams and Wilmore, who were originally meant to be in space for about a week, are assisting other ISS crewmates with research and maintenance spacewalks, their many-months-longer-than-expected stay wasn’t at all intentional. Instead, their return has been repeatedly postponed because of colossal failures on Boeing’s behalf. In short, their protracted ISS visit wasn’t necessary for “maintenance tasks.” It’s all the result of a massive Boeing screwup that stranded two humans in orbit. But you wouldn’t know that from Quartz’s AI-generated article, which completely bungles the facts of the astronauts’ situation and — incredibly — ignores Boeing’s central role in the debacle entirely. Even the headline of the AI-generated article,…Quartz Just Published an AI-Generated Article That Absolutely Butchers the Situation With Boeing’s Stranded Astronauts