On Tuesday, Mediaite told Status’s Oliver Darcy it had suspended founding editor Colby Hall “pending further investigation” for “errors” in the sites’s One Sheet newsletter that Hall had insisted “were purely a result of sloppiness in how he aggregated and categorized information, not from the issue of AI.” This was despite the fact that he had hours earlier told Semafor he used AI in a “limited way” to cull over a dozen media sites (including NewsBusters) each weekday. Hall’s excuses to Semafor spanned the gambit. Regardless of whether AI was actually to directly blame for the errors, this case nonetheless raises serious yet predictable and uncomfortable questions for those who believe AI should be used to write copy and replace humans (click “expand”): In an email to Semafor, Hall told Semafor that while he uses AI in a “limited way,” all “written ideas, angles, summaries, takes, and editorial judgments are mine.” He said the mistakes were the result of problems with his production process. Hall said he has a spreadsheet populated with dozens of newsletters, organizing the sheet with “columns for source, writer, topic, angle, summary, and takeaway.” He said his recent errors “originated in the data entry process.” “Like many editors, I use AI in a limited way as part of my editorial workflow — primarily as a copy and organizational aid,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’ve made mistakes that are easy to jump on. I’m committed to ensuring that mistakes like this don’t happen in the future, but if they do, we will honor those with corrections,” he said. Darcy wrote Tuesday night about a number of remarkable instances where Hall had either “invent[ed] stories out of thin air, fabricate[d] quotes, or misattribute[d] reporting to the wrong person or outlet” in One Sheet, starting with this one from earlier in the month about Breaker’s Lachlan Cartwright: Earlier this month, Colby Hall, founding editor of Mediaite and author of its One Sheet newsletter, celebrated independent media journalist Lachlan Cartwright. In the newsletter—which aims to round up and summarize reporting from other subscription outlets—Hall awarded Cartwright “Newsletter of the Day” for supposedly reporting on how Status lost a scoop about Jeff Shell negotiating his exit from Paramount. There was just one problem: Cartwright never reported any such thing. Following its heavily publicized launch at the start of the year (including a story in The Spectator, which I was quoted in), Darcy added murmurs began “in media circles for egregious errors and writing that bore an eerie resemblance to ChatGPT.” Along with Hall having assigned fake or misattributed quotes to Breaker and Status, Darcy charted his site as having been a victim of outright plagiarism on March 20 while, in various editions of One Sheet, The Bulwark’s Will Sommer, CNN’s Brian Stelter, and Harvard’s Nieman Lab were credited for quotes they never penned. Darcy argued Hall’s “most serious error yet” was in Monday’s One Sheet when he asserted Status had “quietly rewrote” its April 10 edition about CNN boss Mark Thompson possibly laying the groundwork for a successor whenever he chooses to step down. As a Status subscriber, that’s simply not possible as, while it has a website, it exists as a daily newsletter. Thus, once it’s sent, it can’t be rewritten. But, wait, there was more: “Hall appeared to outright fabricate a quote and attribute it to our very own Jon Passantino, putting us on heavily blast on Mediaite’s website and in its newsletter for something we did not do.” Darcy called of this “unusual...for a reporter tasked with covering the news industry—and who regularly calls out others for ethical breaches—to be caught in a scandal of his own making” and could cast doubt on whether paying for a subscription would be a worthwhile investment. A frequent basher of our friend and conservative talk radio icon Mark Levin, Hall has been an occasional target at NewsBusters over the years. Most recently in January, we pointed out Hall was less than enthused and more disgusted by the CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil’s five core values, specifically the declaration that “We Love America.” Last June, our Tim Graham discussed on the NewsBusters Podcast Hall’s bizarre hot take that the White House had made then-New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a liberal foil.