77 AI-written finance articles, published quietly — and wrong in more than half
CNET · 2022–2023
What they did
Starting November 2022, CNET quietly published 77 articles written by an internally built AI engine under bylines like "CNET Money Staff," without clearly disclosing the AI authorship, on personal-finance explainer topics like compound interest and CD rates.
What happened
After Futurism reported factual errors in one article in January 2023, CNET's editors reviewed all 77 and found incorrect information in 41 of them — including a compound-interest explainer that miscalculated a year's earnings by a factor of more than 30 ($10,300 instead of $300 on a $10,000 deposit). CNET paused the AI-writing program and issued corrections, but its editor-in-chief initially defended continuing to use the tool.
The so-what
Personal finance is exactly the wrong beat to let an unreviewed model publish under a human-sounding byline: the errors are concrete numbers a reader will act on, and "AI wrote this" wasn't disclosed clearly enough for a reader to apply extra skepticism.