Zombie bots are reporting the news in one Southern Oregon town and honestly, we’re triggered.

According to an Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) report, the Ashland Daily Tidings website in Ashland, OR, about 15 miles north of the California border on I-5, operated for months with a newsroom staff partially made up of AI zombie bots. Honestly, at WGTC, we’re pretty shook.

OPB’s report hits close to home, as We Got This Covered has similarly had multiple websites steal our work and pass it off as their own ⏤ from direct plagiarism, to copy-pasted text that is slightly altered but not properly attributed.

According to OPB, DailyTidings.com, owned by Difference Media, has produced a wealth of reporting in the year since the paper’s print edition shut down, with bylines, some of whom were actual reporters, but who seemed to write and publish stories from every corner of the state, produced at a rate that didn’t seem humanly possible — and according to OPB, that’s because it’s not.

“It seems quite terrifying”

The reporters OPB mentioned in the article have since been scrubbed from the Daily Tiding‘s site, but one of the reporters, Joe Minihane, who, if the Daily Tidings website was to be believed, published consistently for the outlet, is an author and journalist who lives in the U.K., and has only been in Oregon once, in Portland, about 330 miles north of Ashland.

Speaking with OPB, Minihane said, “It seems quite terrifying. I have friends who live in Portland, but I’ve never been to another part of the state, so I just don’t know quite how it came to pass.”

OPB says that after the Daily Tidings print edition shutdown, the website listed eight reporters, two from London, and many with no other social media presence or apparent career outside Daily Tidings. Only two purportedly lived in Southern Oregon.

Meanwhile, two of the reporters were tracked to South Africa. They didn’t respond to OPB’s request for comment, but one shared this LinkedIn post recently, OPB said: “Try to learn Artificial intelligence and don’t curse in AI. Do your hard work and Update your skills.”

AI in journalism: Pros and cons

As alarming as OPB’s allegations are, a website like Daily Tidings using AI to generate copy isn’t exactly illegal, according to a 2023 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report. However, it could violate copyright law if found too similar to existing material, and drawing from already published writing found online is how generative AI copy works.

In October, The New York Times reported that they don’t use AI to write articles. However, the venerable outlet uses AI to gather data, generate rough drafts, and other types of automation, content recommendation, and reader services. Ultimately, The Times says flesh-and-blood journalists are responsible for everything the outlet publishes.

AI in the news could further erode public trust in reporting, and force an industry already under pressure to shed jobs, but it’s likely here to stay. Brookings says several major news outlets, including the Associated Press, have already reached agreements with OpenAi to circumvent copyright law, and more such agreements are in the works.

One day, hopefully, we’ll see some transparency about news articles written in part or whole with AI, and outlets like the Ashland Daily Tidings won’t steal real writers’ identities to produce their work.

But for now, as one U.K. journalist told the Columbia Journalism Review, “AI summarization can be wobbly. Depending on the length, it is really actually not very good, I find. I tried it a lot and, well, checking sometimes takes longer than writing a summary myself. Also, the story ideas it gives me are very homogenous. So, yes, it will get better, but I am not sure if this technology is the great flex people think it is.”