What the Sun-Times’ AI blunder says about the future of journalism: Telander

CHICAGO - Some of you may know that I was a sports columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times before coming to Fox 32 Chicago in May. I was at the Sun-Times for 30 years before taking a buyout in April, along with other veteran sports guys, Rick Morrissey, Darryl Van Schouwen and Mark Potash. Longtime Chicago Sky/WNBA writer Annie Costabile also left. Non-sports columnists Michael Sneed and Richard Roeper took buyouts, too.

Almost one in five employees left in the upheaval. The reason? What else?—finances. It’s a tough time for newspapers, especially those not named The New York Times or Wall Street Journal. No need to list the reasons why, but the internet is the big culprit.

The Sun-Times thought it had figured out a sustainable business model when it merged with WBEZ FM-91.5 in January 2022 and became a non-profit newspaper under the Chicago Public Media banner. Though the Sun-Times could no longer endorse political candidates, it could share in the donations and government funding that keep public radio stations afloat. Nykia Wright, then-CEO of the Sun-Times, sounded almost giddy with the deal.

"We are excited about the possibilities that lie ahead for this unique model of nonprofit news and raising the bar for supporting, preserving, and strengthening local journalism," she told the press.

Alas, it didn’t work out as well as Wright hoped. In fairness, it may yet. But in less than three years, the new association hit the skids. Management mistakes and money shortfalls led to cutting expenses—read: workers—which laid bare the fundamental problem with dumping skilled employees to balance your books. By doing so, you undermine the very product you are trying to save.

It seems axiomatic that covering news in the real world means you need human journalists. This is a fact, isn’t it?

Fast-forward to the Sun-Times Sunday edition on May 18, post-buyouts, for a look at the potholes of the future. Also included in that paper was a stand-alone section titled "Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer," with articles telling readers what they could do and be entertained by during the summer months in Chicago. Included was an article about authors and new and recommended book titles. The trouble was many of the book titles and descriptions were fake. Readers noticed.

Other stuff in the section, which was produced by third-party King Features and written by a person named Marco Buscaglia, was not true, including phony sources, experts, and quotes. The stuff wasn’t just bland writing, it was fabrication. With AI’s help.

Fake stuff in a newspaper is deadly. You don’t get many second chances to prove your worth to the public when facts are your stock-in-trade, and you give people misinformation. Random, legitimate mistakes are often made by journalists, and those mistakes should get swift corrections and heartfelt apologies, and readers can then forgive.

But this was something new and different. The Sun-Times printed not just a little, but a bunch of made-up garbage. How and why could this happen? Everybody blamed everybody on down the food chain, with the writer himself admitting he was negligent, but also blaming "my AI naivety and lack of oversight." Sun-Times CEO Melissa Bell did a somersault of semi-remorse, writing the fraud was "the result of human error" and so on.

Then she wrote something that I have read and reread several times, because no matter how many times I read it, I find it stunning. She says that when she started as CEO in September, 2024, she was "asked if we should continue to publish these special editions [from King Features]. I didn’t deeply investigate the editions and quickly approved the team to continue the practice in place. My reasoning: Let’s not sacrifice any revenue."

That’s basically saying, "why bother with editorial fact-checking [of King Features, of Buscaglia, of stories the Sun-Times prints] when there’s money to be made?" Remember, Bell is the one who had overseen the gutting of the Sun-Times staff to reduce expenses. Part of this is about laziness, of course, but it’s all about cutting personnel. And that means it’s also about AI, which apparently was used by Buscaglia as a time-saver before it did its "hallucination" thing.

Why was one person alone doing the work for an outsourced multi-person enterprise—Buscaglia wasn’t even an employee of King Features, but was moonlighting--when the entire "Summer Heat" section would have been produced in former newspaper days by real Sun-Times employees being paid real money for their work?

I think you know the answer.

I am filled here with many thoughts. Let me start with this. Back in early 2023 Sun-Times sports editor Chris DeLuca, a dedicated journalist and good friend, asked me to write a piece for our baseball preview section, out in a few weeks, giving my opinion on how the Cubs and White Sox would do in the coming season. "AI assistant" ChatGPT had become available to the public a month or so before this, so for kicks I instructed it to write my assignment. I gave it a number of instructions, like "Explain why the Cubs will be great in 2023," and watched as it rapidly spit out a piece on my topic.

It was dull and boilerplate, but it was done. Pronto. It likely could have run in a few lousy newspapers. Not in the Sun-Times, for sure. No, no, no. Besides the boredom there were some big mistakes—the AI brain obviously didn’t know about, or didn’t care about, certain late trades and injuries to Cubs and Sox players. I could have fixed those. I suppose.

At any rate, I dumped the thing and forgot about it. I only got into journalism to learn about human nature, express my views and tell athletes’ stories. I would never plagiarize, copy, or use somebody else or something else to tell my tales. That seems ridiculous, pathetic. Why even be in the biz if you do that?

I toyed with ChatGPT again a few days later. I asked it to tell me-–with helpful prompts—why my book "Heaven is a Playground" was the greatest non-fiction book ever printed. Three hundred words. Go. In seconds, it did.

Then I asked it to write a short story featuring a sportswriter named Rick Morrissey and his brilliant, aging Corgi-mutt dog named Brewster, both sitting on a dock on a lake in northern Wisconsin, rumor having it that Brewster, though lazy, "was believed to be the author of a best-selling book about former White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen. Poignant. In the style of Ernest Hemingway."

Boom, it came. Its ending:

"He loved to chew on sticks and bark at squirrels, and he was always finding new ways to amuse himself. He had a mischievous streak, too, and had been known to steal food from the kitchen counter when no one was looking."

"But even as he enjoyed the simple pleasures of life, Brewster knew that his time was limited. He had seen many of his dog friends come and go over the years, and he knew that he would one day join them. But for now, he was content to soak up the sunshine, watch the lake, and cherish the memories of a life well-lived."

I sent it to Rick. He said it was by far my best work, while also wondering, as a friend and fellow scribe, what was wrong with me.

The point is AI can do these things. Pretty badly, when it comes to creativity and nuance, at least for now. And there are those hallucinations, such as the way AI can’t tell the difference between a chihuahua’s face and a blueberry muffin. But fast and cheap.  And we humans always go for fast and cheap.

AI will only get better. Which is the ironic part of Bell’s long letter to readers apologizing for the AI screw-up; artificial intelligence is the future of writing. It could take a long time, but it will happen, I have no doubt.

About three decades ago on "The Sportswriters on TV" show we panelists discussed a new computer program we’d read about that could take stats from a basketball game and print out a fairly dull, but fast—and cheap—game story. For smaller high schools without press coverage it seemed like a possibility. I don’t know what became of it. Maybe it’s in use right now.

Mark Zuckerberg recently said AI chatbots could likely help end the epidemic of loneliness plaguing humans. The chatbots would be conversational "friends," he said. That’s way beyond book titles or made-up names.

As AI teaches itself to learn, which it does, its "descendants" get smarter and smarter, without rest. An article on AI in the May 27 issue of The New Yorker states that the fear among some programmers is that, "Eventually, the A.I.s begin creating better descendants so quickly that human programmers don’t have time to study them and decide whether they’re controllable." That’s out of our league, folks. Genius robots comin’ for us! I just want people to keep reading the Sun-Times and forgive it for its quite stupid and mercenary AI mistake. I have so many friends still there, and I know what outstanding writers they are. We need newspapers.

Robots can’t do that work, yet.

I just know I won’t be around for AI to replace me as a journalist. And for that I’m happy. I’d make a really bad co-pilot.

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