The Sacramento Bee’s AI-generated earthquake and wildfire news needs some work

The Sacramento Bee, like many publications across the country, has been experimenting with AI-generated content for its website, particularly in the area of ​​real-time wildfire and earthquake updates. But it looks like they might need more human eyes on these things.

In the past few days, the Sacramento Bee website has published several false reports of earthquakes — although they were incorrectly generated by the USGS’ earthquake notification system, but were quickly retracted — and a false report on wildfires.

Monday evening’s earthquake reports are attributed to McClatchy’s CA Earthquake Bot – the report linked above reported an offshore earthquake west of Bonnie Doon, in Santa Cruz County, with a preliminary magnitude of 3.7.

This was one of several false alarms recorded by the USGS’s automated earthquake notification system in Northern California on Monday night, as we previously reported, and the USGS quickly noticed the errors and removed the false earthquake notifications from its website. The Sacramento Bee post about the quake, along with several others like this 3.2-meter quake near Shaver Lake that didn’t occur, remain on the site.

A correction appears in this post as of Wednesday afternoon, regarding wildfires in Ventura County that were found to be non-existent. This story was attributed to “CA Wildfire Bot”.

“A previously published report of a wildfire in Ventura County was published in error and has been removed. There is no such fire,” the post now reads. “The report was generated due to a system error from data provided by the National Interagency Fire Center. We apologize for the error.”

This automated bug appears to have mistook a 500-acre wildfire in Valencia County, New Mexico, called the United Fire, which broke out Wednesday, as a fire in Ventura County in SoCal. Cal Fire quickly saw the erroneous report and notified the Sacramento Bee.

Incidentally, both CA Wildfire Bot and Earthquake Bot now produce dozens of posts a day, one for each wildfire or earthquake notification, the former relying on Cal Fire or INCI web data – and/or NIFC, which appears to have been blamed for the errant post.

Earthquake posts linked to the withdrawn USGS posts continue to link to pages on the USGS website that have since been deleted.

These posts, generated by the Sacramento Bee’s AI, previously had a joking disclaimer saying: “This article was generated by CA Earthquake Bot, a program that analyzes structured information, such as data, and applies it to articles based on models created by journalists in the newsroom. No human journalists were harmed in this experiment.”

But that disclaimer has now changed to say: “The creation of this content involved the use of artificial intelligence based on models created, reviewed and edited by journalists in the newsroom.”

Photography by Fascist Marine

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