Journalist Peter Vandermeersch, who worked with Dutch publisher Mediahuis, reportedly fabricated expert quotes into 15 of 53 articles written for them
A senior European journalist has been suspended after publishing expert quotes generated by artificial intelligence (AI) that were presented as genuine.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Peter Vandermeersch inserted “dozens” of fabricated quotes into 15 of 53 articles, which he wrote for two Mediahuis websites, alleged an investigation by Dutch newspaper NRC.
“There are quotes that cannot be found in the publications from which Vandermeersch claims to have obtained them, such as news articles and scientific studies,” the paper reported. Seven of the individuals cited in those articles confirmed they had never made the statements attributed to them.
Vandermeersch, who served as chief executive of Mediahuis Ireland from 2022 to 2025 before becoming a fellow in journalism and society at the European publishing group has now been temporarily suspended from that role. He confirmed the suspension on his blog.
Vandermeersch wrote on Substack that he had relied on tools including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s Notebook to summarise lengthy reports, trusting the outputs to be accurate.
Instead, the systems had invented quotes that ultimately “put words into people’s mouths,” he said.
“That was not just careless, it was wrong,” he wrote. “It is particularly painful that I made precisely the mistake I have repeatedly warned colleagues about: these language models are so good that they produce irresistible quotes you are tempted to use as an author.”
Vandermeersch said he first discovered the issue last year, when two of his articles were found to contain AI-generated quotes. He did not correct them at the time.
“When I realised this a few months ago, my enthusiasm diminished, as did my use of AI,” he said.
He added that he still uses such tools for translation, idea generation, headlines, and story angles, but now with “far less naive trust than before”.
