The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review | Books

The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.

It came after a New York Times reader flagged similarities between the paper’s January review of Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, written by author and journalist Alex Preston, and an August review of the same book written by Christobel Kent in the Guardian.

The New York Times launched an investigation, during which Preston admitted that he had used AI to assist writing the review and did not spot the sections that were pulled from the Guardian before submitting it. In a statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Preston said that he was “hugely embarrassed” and had “made a serious mistake”.

The New York Times alerted the Guardian to the overlap in an email sent on Monday, and added an editor’s note to the review acknowledging the use of AI and linking to the Guardian piece. “A reader recently alerted the Times that this review included language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in the Guardian,” reads the editor’s note. “We spoke to the author of this piece, a freelancer reviewer, who told us he used an AI tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove. His reliance on AI and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of the Times’s standards.”

Language that appears to be lifted from the Guardian review includes descriptions of characters – “lazy Machiavellian Stefano” appears as “lazy, Machiavellian Stefano” in the New York Times version – and the concluding assessment of the novel: the Guardian review states that the book is “most significantly a song of love to a country of contradictions, battered, war-torn, divided, misguided and miraculous: an Italy where life is costume and the performance of art, and where circuses spring up on wasteland”; while the New York Times version says the characters “populate what is ultimately a love song to a country of contradictions: battered, divided, misguided and miraculous. This is an Italy where life is performance, where circuses rise on wasteland.”

A spokesperson for the New York Times told the Guardian that Preston would no longer write for the paper. Preston wrote six reviews for the paper between 2021 and 2026, but told the New York Times he had not used AI to aid any of his other articles.

“I made a serious mistake in using an AI tool on a draft review I had written, and I failed to identify and remove overlapping language from another review that the AI dropped in,” Preston said in his statement to the Guardian. “I am hugely embarrassed by what happened and truly sorry. I took responsibility immediately and apologised to the New York Times, and I also want to apologise to Christobel Kent and to the Guardian.”

Preston has written extensively for the Observer and the FT, as well as contributing to the Guardian and the Economist. He is a six-time author whose most recent book, A Stranger in Corfu, was published in February, and is also the head of advisory at investment management firm Man Group. Earlier this year, he wrote a piece for the Man Group site titled The AI Bubble: Hidden Risks and Opportunities.