In January 2023, the tech outlet CNET was found to have published dozens of AI-generated finance explainer articles under a generic 'CNET Money Staff' byline, several of which contained factual errors that required correction once readers and other outlets started checking the math. Ten months later, a separate and arguably worse scandal broke at Sports Illustrated, whose parent company was reported to have run articles under bylines attached to AI-generated headshots and biographies for authors who did not exist at all.
Those two cases are not the same failure, and the difference is instructive. CNET's error was insufficient disclosure about how real work got made. Sports Illustrated's error was deeper: there was no person behind the name to hold accountable in the first place, which is the one thing a byline is actually for.
Bylines were never really about authorship in the romantic sense. They functioned as an accountability marker — a named person whose professional reputation was attached to the accuracy of what appeared under their name, who could be asked to explain a claim, correct an error, or lose credibility for a pattern of getting things wrong. A fabricated author cannot lose anything.
The Associated Press has since published standards requiring that generative AI output not be published as finished copy without human review, and that AI-generated images be labeled as such — a narrower rule than 'disclose everything,' but a clearer one than most outlets had before 2023, and one written specifically in response to cases like these.
The position that survives contact with both scandals is that a byline should track responsibility, not keystrokes. A named editor who reviewed, verified, and stands behind a piece has earned the byline regardless of how the first draft was produced. What should not survive is either version of the alternative — an undisclosed process, or a name that was never a person to begin with — and Duck Times bylines exist to make sure ours are always the first kind of failure to guard against, never the second.