AI, profanity and getting it right (2024)

The Casper Star-Tribune will come to an end when our readers no longer trust us to deliver honest, accurate news.

Three incidents have occurred, partially within these pages, that challenge that.

Artificial reporters?

The Star-Tribune is among several publications that reprinted stories by Cody Enterprise reporter Aaron Pelczar. When confronted by veteran Powell Tribune reporter CJ Baker, Pelczar admitted to using generative AI and resigned.

The Star-Tribune reprinted two stories carrying Pelczar’s byline, “Degenfelder expects new Title IX policies to be overturned” on June 20 and “Firefighters battle challenging terrain combating Clearwater Fire” on Aug. 3.

A quote attributed to U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman about trans athletes in the first story is a likely fabrication. As of writing this column, Cody Enterprise Editor Chris Bacon says he does not know of any fabrications in the wildfire story.

For more than a year, Lee Enterprises, the Star-Tribune’s parent corporation, has been studying AI to see if it has any role in the newsroom. Mostly, no.

Currently, the company’s belief – along with the vast, overwhelming majority of journalists – is that generative AI, like that used by Pelczar to write his stories, has no place in the production of your daily newspaper. The problem is that AI engines tend to hallucinate – they make up facts that sound good but aren’t. “Truthy,” as Stephen Colbert would put it, is not “true.”

Indeed, when we wrote about cobras supposedly being found on a highway outside of Casper a few weeks ago, we turned to GPTZero, a tool promoted by Lee during internal training, to determine the article was fabrication of a computer. And reporter Dylan Farrell — assuredly a human — had a much simpler tool that gave the same result — his gut.

So while we have strictly said “NO!” to allowing AI to write our stories, we have said “yes” to using very limited AI tools to help writers transcribe their recordings and help them spot AI-generated content.

For now, I can assure you that every story you read in your paper is written by a human. If we discover otherwise, we’ll let you know.

If you are curious, I was, I asked ChatGPT to write an editorial about why it shouldn’t write editorials, you’ll find it linked to this article at trib.com.

Expletive deleted

In the second incident, Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray posted a threat he received to social media on Tuesday.

“Today, I received this threatening message because of our work defending election integrity. The inaccurate reporting of the lying left-wing media is inciting people like this. This is how the radical left now operates,” Gray wrote.

In printing the story, we chose to leave intact the full profanity-laced threat. Part of this decision was based on Gray’s actions. As the threatened individual, Gray felt it was important to share the message.

The Star-Tribune seeks to be straightforward and unbiased in our reporting. If we disagree with Gray, you’ll learn about that in a clearly marked opinion on this page, not in our news reporting.

While we may not be so certain about what sent the disturbed individual over the edge, Gray is at least partially right; these crimes don’t happen in a vacuum, and each individual is radicalized by the media — traditional and social — they consume. As a former editor at The Buffalo (New York) News, I am all too familiar with this reality.

On May 14, 2022, a deranged teen [and I won’t honor him by naming him here] was in a seeming feedback loop of social media when he walked into a supermarket with a semi-automatic rifle. Ten people, including an off-duty police officer, a sister picking up groceries for her brother who has leukemia, a wife returning home from visiting her husband in a nursing home, a man who had just given someone a lift, a teacher, a fiancée, a grandmother, a civil rights activist, a school bus aide and a father picking up a birthday cake he would never get to bring home to his 3-year-old son died. We know his motivation as he wrote freely of it and indeed live streamed his atrocity.

While the Anti-Defamation League has tracked the rise in violence in America to the rise in hate speech in media, particularly on the right, a single incident on the left, a single death is too many. Just because fewer left-wing extremists take to guns in this country doesn’t mean just one is acceptable.

As a society, we can’t dismiss Gray’s comments as hyperbole in the quest for a political goal. As an editor, I can only hope that by printing the threat, we open a discussion and not a feedback loop of hate.

As journalists at the Star-Tribune, our guide stars are truth, accuracy and transparency. We attempt to be fully truthful and fully accurate in everything we write. In these occasional columns, I am attempting to add transparency. And I will use this incident as a teaching moment for myself.

The story Gray specifically questioned wasn’t by the Star-Tribune, but as he said, it contained an error. How do I know? I simply pulled up the article and scrolled to the bottom, and there it was: a correction.

We have an informal policy of doing the same at the Star-Tribune. We’ll be making it formal. We will place all corrections in short “Setting the record straight” notices in the paper and online at the bottom of the story in which the error occurred.

We messed up

Indeed, you’ll see two corrections in today’s Star-Tribune, one about the AI-generated quote and the second brought to our attention by a reader who brought to attention the location we gave for the proposed mine at the base of Casper Mountain and specifically the creek that cuts through the property.

In 2021, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names was tasked with reconsidering names that could be considered derogatory. The creek at the base of Casper Mountain didn’t make the cut, as it contained a derogatory description of Native American women.

In 2022, the stream’s new name, Platte Creek, was entered into the official Geographic Names Information System. Want to know if Monkeys Eyebrow really is a place? Look it up. Yup, and it’s in Ballard County, Kentucky. Does it have an apostrophe? Nope.

If we had checked the database’s more than 56,000 entries for Natrona County, we would have learned that the name entered on June 5, 1979, had been struck on Sept. 8, 2022, in favor of a “non-controversial” name.

We also would have received a warning about the term had we checked the Associated Press Stylebook. Never use the word the AP warns, unless in a place name. Well, that isn’t a problem anymore.

It is appropriate that we apologize for using the outdated and offensive name.

I want to thank Secretary Gray and our reader for bringing these issues to our attention.

Our reporting seeks to be accurate, fair and uplifting to our community, not divisive. And when we are wrong, we’ll tell you in print and at the bottom of the story online.