Incident: AI explainers publish wrong interest sums

Module 5 · Incident file · About 30 minutes

What happened

From November 2022, the technology site CNET published short personal-finance explainers drafted with an AI tool, under the byline "CNET Money Staff". In January 2023 Jon Christian of Futurism reported errors in them ("CNET's Article-Writing AI Is Already Publishing Very Dumb Errors", Futurism, January 2023, updated 29 January 2023). Engadget reported on 18 January 2023 that CNET was reviewing the articles after being told of the errors, and that editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo had confirmed about 75 such articles since November (Mariella Moon, Engadget).

The best-known error was in "What Is Compound Interest?". It said that if you deposit 10,000 USD in an account earning 3% interest compounded annually, "you'll earn $10,300 at the end of the first year". Futurism points out that the 10,300 includes the deposit: the interest earned is 300. Another explainer said a 25,000 USD car loan at 4% means paying "a flat $1,000 in interest per year", ignoring that interest is charged on a balance that falls as you repay.

What it cost was trust and work. On 25 January 2023 Guglielmo wrote that 77 short articles had been made with the tool, about 1% of what CNET published in that period. Reviewing all of them, editors "found incorrect information in 41 of the 77 articles": a small number needed major corrections, several minor ones such as transposed numbers. CNET paused the tool until editors were confident their process would catch errors (as reported by Matthias Bastian, The Decoder, 25 January 2023 update). The articles were not unreviewed: according to the same report, editors drafted them with the AI, then edited and expanded them before publication.