Senior Journalist Suspended After Publishing Dozens of AI-Fabricated Quotes. He Had Written a Blog About Press Integrity.

Peter Vandermeersch, former editor-in-chief of NRC, one of the Netherlands' most respected newspapers, was suspended by Mediahuis after publishing dozens of fabricated quotes in his Substack newsletter. He used ChatGPT, Perplexity, and NotebookLM to summarize reports. Never verified a single quote. Seven people confirmed they never said what was attributed to them. His own former newspaper investigated him and broke the story. His defense: "I fell into the trap of hallucinations." The part that makes it a flag: "It is particularly painful that I made precisely the mistake I have repeatedly warned colleagues about." He literally wrote about press integrity and human oversight. Then didn't do human oversight. The machines didn't fail here. The human did. He outsourced verification to AI and published fiction as journalism. No editorial review caught it. No fact-checker flagged it. The system designed to keep information trustworthy had exactly one job.