The Sacramento Bee, like many publications across the country, has been experimenting with AI-generated content for its website, particularly in the realm of real-time wildfire and earthquake updates. But it seems like they may need more human eyes on this stuff.

In the last few days, the Sacramento Bee's website has published several false earthquake reports — albeit falsely generated by the US Geological Survey's earthquake notification system, but quickly retracted — and one false wildfire report.

The earthquake reports on Monday evening are attributed to the McClatchy Company's CA Earthquake Bot — the one linked above reported on an offshore earthquake west of Bonny Doon, in Santa Cruz County, with a preliminary magnitude of 3.7.

This was one of several false alarms registered by the USGS's automated earthquake notification system in Northern California Monday night, as we previously reported, and the USGS quickly noted the errors and removed the erroneous earthquake notices from its website. The Sacramento Bee post about the earthquake, along with several others like this 3.2M quake near Shaver Lake that did not happen, remain live on the site.

A correction does appear on this post from Wednesday afternoon, regarding a Ventura County wildfire that turned out not to exist. That story was attributed to "CA Wildfire Bot."

"A previously published report about a wildfire in Ventura County was published in error and has been removed. No such fire existed," the post now reads. "The report was generated due to a system error from data provided by the National Interagency Fire Center. We apologize for the error."

That automated error appears to have mistaken a 500-acre wildfire in Valencia County, New Mexico, called the United Fire, which broke out Wednesday, for a fire in SoCal's Ventura County. And Cal Fire quickly saw the erroneous report, and notified the Sacramento Bee.

The CA Wildfire Bot and Earthquake Bot, by the way, are now producing dozens of posts per day, one for every wildfire or earthquake notification, the former based on Cal Fire or INCI web data — and/or the NIFC, which appears to be blamed for the erroneous post.

The earthquake posts linked to retracted USGS posts continue to link to pages on the USGS site that have since been deleted.

These AI-generated posts at the Sacramento Bee previously had a joke-y disclaimer on them saying, "This article was generated by the CA Earthquake Bot, software that analyzes structured information, such as data, and applies it to articles based on templates created by journalists in the newsroom. No human journalist was harmed in this experiment."

But that disclaimer has now changed to say, "The creation of this content included the use of AI based on templates created, reviewed and edited by journalists in the newsroom."

Photo by Fachy Marin