As I was drafting (another) post about LLM use in literature, this news story popped into my feed. Paywalled but the tl;dr is a freelance book reviewer used LLMs to write a NYT review and the LLMs plagiarized from a Guardian review. Oop.

The NYT review now has this note

“Editors’ Note: March 30, 2026:

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. We spoke to the author of this piece, a freelancer reviewer, who told us he used an A.I. tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove. His reliance on A.I. and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of The Times’s standards. The reviewer said he had not used A.I. in his previous reviews for The Times, and we have found no issues in those pieces. The Guardian review of “Watching Over Her” can be read theguardian.com/books/2….”