Fake News and Sloppy Editing: Scientific American and InStyle Offer Examples of Speed Triumphing Over Quality

Fake News and Sloppy Editing: Scientific American and InStyle Offer Examples of Speed Triumphing Over Quality.

There are plenty of instances of opinion or misinformation parading as fact. Sloppy editing doesn’t help defend against fake news.

Yesterday (August 15, 2023), when reading my news stream on Apple News, I found two disheartening mistakes. The first was from the venerable Scientific American. The feed title was “Two New Toxic Birds Discovered.” I don’t usually read about toxic birds, but the article caught my eye because the image was of the strangest birds I had ever seen. So, I clicked.

The headline on the inside read, “In the Depths.” It was an article about fish thriving five miles down in the ocean. Same image but a very different story. The story had not been corrected as of this writing, a day later.

The second post is completely orthogonal to the Scientific American post, but the editing is just as sloppy, albeit more buried in the text; however, the image remained the tell. In the InStyle post, “Kate Beckinsale Partied the Night Away in a See-Through Pink Minidress With the Breeziest Bell Sleeves,” she is partying with a man, face painted and tongue out. He is identified as a member of “Metallica” when he is clearly channeling his inner Gene Simmons, a member of KISS.

Neither of these instances will shift the locus of power or turn young minds into mush. But both reflect our rampant need to consume content at speed and with that swift ingestion, deal with the increasing sloppiness of the editorial process.

When I started writing for trade magazines in the 1980s, most of my articles included initial feedback and an opportunity to rewrite, and often a glance at the proof before publication. Today when I write for sites, I’m rarely even notified if my posts get published—and if typos exist, they seem to exist forever. I am often embarrassed when repurposing an old post to find my mistakes, but more importantly, my mistakes that the editors failed to correct. The publication has moved on, and unlike print, which has an excuse in its physicality for being involatile, online content has not such immutable property.

Although we may not always like the implications, free speech in America requires that we accept differences of opinion, even those that are uninformed or purposefully misleading. I’ll leave it to the Supreme Court to define the subtleties.

As a writer and an editor, though, there is no excuse for incorrect facts or errors in headlines. Sure, they happen, but in an online world, errors of fact on purported fact-based websites should be swiftly corrected and ideally, the error should be acknowledged, so those returning to them can see, with transparency, that their initial read was updated.

If an editor doesn’t know the difference between Metalica and KISS, perhaps they need to ask someone and confirm their assertion before releasing the copy.

Perpetual Editorial Errors and ChatGPT

In the era of ChatGPT and its relentless gorging on all available content, errors like this introduce misrepresentations into the models that drive the chatbot’s responses. Mistakes once lost in the mire of digital history now become grist for the agents of verbal prediction that prioritize not for currency and optimized for SEM and SEO like search engines, but for everything in its corpus, awaiting at a millisecond’s notice to predict the string of words prompted by a user query.

When some historian, years hence, wants to know which rock bands Kate Beckinsale used to hang out with, some future version of ChatGPT will likely say, “Kate Beckinsale used to hang out with Metallica.” And without reference or the image to counter the assertion, Beckinsale’s biographer, informed by ChatGPT-based research, will perpetuate the error, associating her with glam metal rather than glam rock. How that error ripples through the annals of rock history and the toll it will take remains unpredictable.

What I do know is that the reduced emphasis on editorial integrity makes it hard for legitimate, fact-based publications to take on misinformation. They need to get their fish and their rock bands in order first.

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