Gannett: the sports recap with the template still showing
Automated high-school sports recaps went out across Gannett's local papers with the template placeholders printed verbatim: Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]]. Readers mocked it until it went viral, and the company paused AI-written recaps in every market using the vendor. Nothing in the pipeline checked the output before publish, and no reader needed a login to do it after.
What the verified record says.
- Organizations
- Gannett; LedeAI
- When
- August 2023
- Failure class
- Silent wrong output silent-wrong-output
- Discovered by
- A member of the public public Not caught by the organization running the AI
- Missing control
- A human verification step. A person who reads generated output before it ships, with the specific job of checking claims. Full definition and the other incidents in this group → Watch this kind of control catch a planted failure → A recorded run of a certificate gate refusing a bad document →
- What would have caught it
- A person reads generated copy before it publishes, with an automated check that no template placeholder survives into print.
- Sources
-
- CNN primary
- Verification
- Confirmed: the claims held as first researched. Verified against the primary source on August 12, 2026. Published on this site August 13, 2026, updated September 1, 2026.
This record is one of 26 in The receipts, each checked against a primary source before it is published. How the list is built →