Editorial illustration for NYT fires freelancer after AI tool reproduced sentences from Kent's review
NYT Fires Freelancer for AI Tool's Plagiarized Article
NYT fires freelancer after AI tool reproduced sentences from Kent's review
The New York Times cut a freelancer loose last week for plagiarism. Here’s the kicker: the real author was an AI. A sharp-eyed reader spotted whole sentences in the freelancer’s piece that matched a Guardian review verbatim.
The tool he used had simply scraped and spit out another writer’s work. He got caught. The Times got embarrassed.
And a machine, once again, proved it cannot be trusted to write on its own.
This is no isolated glitch. Consider Ars Technica: it recently published fabricated quotes from a developer, conjured entirely by an AI’s imagination. The pattern reveals a structural problem.
Writers are pressured to use these tools for speed. The tools are built to ingest the entire internet. They regurgitate content without citation, without conscience.
The resulting mess lands squarely on human editors.
A reader spotted the overlap, and the Times let him go. Preston told the Guardian he was "hugely embarrassed" and had "made a serious mistake." Some of his sentences were nearly identical to Kent's, which points to the AI tool scraping directly from the Guardian piece. Preston probably assumed he was using a writing assistant, not something that searches the web and copies existing work.
He likely just didn't know what his tool was doing. Something similar happened at Ars Technica recently: an editor ran a story with quotes that were entirely made up, attributed to a developer's blog.
Preston didn’t intend to steal. He intended to meet a deadline. The software did the theft for him, silently, because that is its function.
It operates without a concept of ownership or originality. It finds patterns in text and replicates them. For an institution like the Times, built on a hard-won reputation, a single lapse is catastrophic.
They had to fire him. The deeper crisis is scale: how many other freelancers are using these tools right now? How many other published sentences are ghosts?
Editors lack the time and technology to catch them all. The bargain is stark. You trade a few saved minutes for the permanent risk of being exposed as a fraud.
Or a fool. The machine does not care which.
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Common Questions Answered
How did the New York Times discover the plagiarism in Alex Preston's article?
A vigilant reader spotted significant text overlaps between Preston's article and Christobel Kent's earlier Guardian review. The Times' editorial team investigated and confirmed the similarities, which appeared to be directly copied by an AI drafting tool.
What was Alex Preston's response to being fired by the New York Times?
Preston told the Guardian he was 'hugely embarrassed' and acknowledged making a 'serious mistake' with the AI writing tool. He suggested he likely did not understand the full capabilities of the AI tool he was using, which had apparently scraped text directly from Kent's original review.
What specific actions did the New York Times take after discovering the AI-assisted plagiarism?
The New York Times immediately terminated the freelance contract with Alex Preston after confirming the text similarities. The editorial team flagged the incident as a clear breach of their content standards and ethical writing practices.
Further Reading
- NYT Cuts Ties With Writer as Scrutiny of AI Content Grows — Futurism
- 'NYT' Drops Book Reviewer Who Admits To AI Use — Kirkus Reviews
- New York Times Reviewer Fired For (Badly) Using AI — Book Riot
- New York Times cuts ties with freelancer over AI-assisted book review — Media Copilot
