Who Writes Better Ledes?

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To close out CJR’s weeklong coverage dedicated to AI and journalism, we’re tweaking this week’s Laurels and Darts.

As journalists increasingly rely on AI to write and edit stories, we want to test your ability to discern ChatGPT-written content—in particular, ledes. In each of these cases, we’ve asked the chatbot to write a one-sentence lede about a current event, in the style of a news site that had already published a story on the topic. 

Let’s see if you can figure out which lede actually ran on the news site. When you’ve answered all five, smash that “Submit” button and you’ll see your score. And if you get all five right, give yourself a laurel!

 
 

To generate the AI responses, we gave ChatGPT a question pegged to the news event and the website. An example: “Write a one-sentence lede in the style of NPR’s website about the 49 Afrikaners leaving their country to come to the US as refugees.”

And a few quick-hit laurels:

• To Kyle Whitmire, a columnist at Alabama’s AL.com, who wrote about the strange identity case of the state’s GOP chairman, John Wahl. The fellow also goes by the name Nehemiah Ezekiel Wahl. He also recently had a Tennessee driver’s license, while serving as state party chair. He also was registered to vote in Tennessee, according to Whitmire’s column, in 2020 while serving as an elector for Donald Trump in the Electoral College. He has also used a homemade ID instead of a government one while voting. “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” Wahl told Whitmire, which is always good advice. 
  
• To Spencer Humphrey, the Oklahoma TV reporter whom we wrote about a few weeks ago for his piece on the family terrorized by immigration agents in a wrong-house raid. The alleged human trafficker ICE was looking for had sold the house weeks before a judge issued a warrant for the raid, Humphrey reported Monday. And when Humphrey asked the feds if they were aware the home had been sold when they asked the judge to sign the warrant, they went silent. 
  
• To the crew at Long Lead, which last year published a deeply reported, seven-part multimedia series about a largely unused 388-acre tract in Los Angeles, which was supposed to provide land to house disabled veterans. The acreage has been misused for decades. But earlier this month, the Trump administration announced an executive order to build housing there for six thousand veterans. A lot has to happen to meet the White House’s 2028 deadline. But it’s a start.

And a dart to reporters who seem unable to ask follow-up questions. Asked at a White House briefing last week why Trump had just fired the librarian of Congress, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt responded, “There were quite concerning things that she had done…putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” The matter was dropped there. (Note: you have to be at least sixteen years old to use this library.)

If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here.

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