A SENIOR JOURNALIST at the Mediahuis group, publisher of the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent, has been suspended after it emerged he used quotes fabricated by AI.
Peter Vandermeersch, who served as chief executive for Mediahuis’ Ireland branch from 2022 to 2025, took up a role as the company’s first ‘Journalism and Society’ fellow and had been publishing a newsletter covering the practice of journalism.
After a Dutch news outlet reported that some of the quotes included in the newsletter had never been said by the people to whom they were attributed, he admitted on his personal blog that he had used large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
“I was not careful enough,” Vandermeersch wrote on Substack.
“I was enthusiastic about the possibilities these tools offered and wanted to experiment with them extensively,” he said, adding that he had “fallen into the trap of hallucinations”, the term used to describe the errors or fabrications of LLMs.
He said he relied on summaries produced by LLMs, “trusting they were accurate”.
“That was not just careless — it was wrong,” he said.
Vandermeersch said that a staff member at NRC, a Mediahuis-owned Dutch newspaper where he was once editor-in-chief, had contacted him to tell him the quotes in question could not be verified.
NRC ran an article about the issue today, reporting that seven of the quoted individuals had confirmed they did not make the statements attributed to them.
“This should never have happened,” Mediahuis group CEO Gert Ysebaert said in a statement this evening.
“At Mediahuis, we apply strict rules for the use of AI, where diligence, human oversight and transparency are essential.
“The fact that these principles were not followed runs counter to the standards we uphold and to our commitment to readers that we stand for reliable journalism.
“We are discussing this with Peter Vandermeersch and have decided to temporarily suspend him from his role as Fellow.”
The Journal has asked Peter Vandermeersch for further comment.