A reporter in Cleveland, working for the storied, 184-year-old newspaper The Plain Dealer, leaves town on a well-earned honeymoon. But while she’s gone, her contributions to the newspaper website, Cleveland.com, remain … but not because she prepared written reporting in advance. Instead, the journalist, government reporter Kaitlin Durbin, said she was disturbed to find that her name had simply been attached by her employer to AI-generated reporting that she had nothing to do with.
“Trying to understand how this story published with my byline last week while I was on my honeymoon,” posted a perturbed Durbin online this week. “I did not write or review a word of it and it does not pull info from past reporting. Does Cleveland.com think they just own my name now?”
Beyond the rather bold decision of a reporter to go immediately to Twitter to put their employer on blast, seemingly before determining what exactly happened to lead to this embarrassing, AI-generated state of affairs, this is obviously a horrendous look for a venerable news-gathering institution with a history like that of The Plain Dealer. The paper has not issued a full statement on the incident, but the specific article in question has since been edited to remove Durbin’s byline, replacing it with “Cleveland.com Express Desk,” which is the paper’s name for its AI initiative to “use AI tools to assist in producing content” that is supposedly then “reviewed and edited by staff.” As the note on the article now observes, “Note: This story has been updated to correct the byline. A reporter’s byline was added to the story in error.”
On Sept 7, Durbin posted on X that she did “not write or review a word of” an AI story that was published under her byline while she was out on her honeymoon. She added that the article did not “pull info from” her “past reporting.”
— Maggie Harrison Dupré (@mharrisondupre.bsky.social) 9:50 AM · Sep 8, 2026
Is an error of this sort possible? Absolutely, but even an “honest” error of this kind would simply be indicative of the degradation of the journalistic process all the same at institutions that are determined to excise humans from that process wherever they can be removed for the sake of streamlining, efficiency, and the slim ability to generate any kind of profit in the ailing news industry. In the worst case scenario, this would be an intentional attempt by a publisher to “human wash” its AI content by assigning the AI-generated copy to a more familiar human name that local readers would recognize and trust. In the perhaps more likely scenario, it’s evidence of the slipping standards of review and oversight of local reporting at a newspaper that once employed some 400 people in the late 1990s, but only around 70 today following constant waves of industry-wide contraction.
Suffice to say, it’s also very interesting to see this particular story happen at this newspaper now, considering that back in February the Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com were all over the news thanks to comments made by editor Chris Quinn in defense of the organization’s decision to employ an AI writing desk to create local news content. Quinn in particular found himself under fire after he complained bitterly online that a fresh college grad had withdrawn from a reporting fellowship after the graduate learned the job would not actually involve writing, but instead would involve him feeding notes into an AI tool that would be producing stories. Quinn caught righteous flack from reporters still doing actual, human writing for the way he framed the journalism graduate’s decision to walk away as that of a foolish idealist being left behind by the march of progress, ignorant of the many benefits AI would provide to newsgathering operations.
Or as Quinn put it at the time: “Artificial intelligence is not bad for newsrooms. It’s the future of them. By removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week.”
A conscientious journalism grad withdraw from a job when she learned the Cleveland Plain Dealer uses AI to write its stories.
Now the editor is castigating her and journalism professors for not being “prepared for the workforce.”
You can’t make this shit up.
www.cleveland.com/news/2026/02…
— Nathan Kalman-Lamb (@nkalamb.bsky.social) 7:16 AM · Feb 16, 2026
I expect you can guess what people thought of the dystopian vibes of suggesting that an “extra workday” worth of content could be wrung from every reporter in the newsroom via the small task of “removing writing from reporters’ workloads.” Quinn took his lumps in the court of popular opinion at the time, but what just happened with Kaitlin Durbin indicates that the Plain Dealer has clearly continued using AI tools and wholly AI-generated stories in the months following the initial bad press. In the last 24 hours alone, in fact, the paper has published seven pieces using the “Cleveland.com Express Desk” byline, some in conjunction with additional human reporter bylines. One wonders what the process of “real accountability” is that Leila Atassi, editor of public interest and advocacy at Cleveland.com explained to Columbia Journalism Review back in February when she promised that anything published by the AI news desk would still be “work of a real reporter,” and that “AI is the assistant, but it’s not the journalist.” Is the Plain Dealer capable of explaining in any given article where the “work of a real reporter” begins and ends?
Perhaps the saddest thing about the underlying push toward AI automation in these circumstances is the decreased esteem that it eventually causes famed newsgathering organizations to place in the skills of the human beings those organizations employ. Reporters are railroaded into using AI tools that not only pose an existential threat to their careers, but are also held accountable for errors introduced by the tools they are required to use. And at the same time, their employer is likely to downplay how valuable the contributions of the human beings are to this process, which only increases the likelihood that those human reporters will wind up unemployed, given that there’s a decreased appreciation and valuation for what they do. That’s how we end up with a quote like this one from internal Slack messages at the Associated Press, in which one of the organization’s “AI experts” in February tried to make the argument that most employees aren’t talented enough to simultaneously report and write:
“Because local newsrooms are so strapped, they are turning for assistance on the news making process in every direction. Advance Publications got there first, others will follow. There are many—and I mean MANY—editors who would prefer an AI-written article to a human-written one. Reporting and writing are two different skill sets and rare—RARE—is the occasion when it’s wrapped into one person.”
Once an organization ostensibly focused on journalism gets to this point, where those in charge of integrating AI into the business no longer value the contributions of the human beings they’re intent on replacing, then what hope is there for the average, workaday reporter? How long will it be before a newspaper like the Plain Dealer has no reporters at all, and instead licenses a stable of human reporter names to attach to AI-generated content? Or is that pretty much already happening across the web? Lord, have mercy on we humans who still prowl the ruins of the dead internet.
