Expert: Tom Jensen, Editor-in-chief, Berlingske The retracted passage ran under a story with a straightforward premise: Denmark's Economic Council had weighed banning pesticides against treating drinking water, and the paper reported where its chairmanship landed. Everything else in that passage was invention. It quoted three researchers. Two of them do not exist - "professor Lars Mogensen from Aarhus University" and "technology professor Anne Kjær Nielsen from DTU". The third, "professor Hans Estrup Andersen from Danmarks Tekniske Universitet", is a real researcher, but he is a senior researcher at Aarhus University rather than a DTU professor, and he told Information he never spoke to Berlingske. Two quotations from the Economic Council's report were also reproduced incorrectly: the paper's version had the chairmanship concluding that a ban would eventually be necessary, while the report said a ban would become necessary "to the extent the toxicity is related to so-called forever chemicals, which barely break down in nature". The qualifying clause had been dropped. Berlingske's own account of the mechanism is the part worth keeping. The tool was brought in to summarise expert quotations from an earlier Berlingske article, but the article was not attached. Asked to summarise material it had never been given, the model did not report an empty input; it produced quotations, and with quotations came the people who supposedly said them. Editor-in-chief Tom Jensen: "We have looked into the process since yesterday and must conclude that the employee in question has used an internal AI tool in violation of the very clear guidelines we have at Berlingske for working with AI." Those guidelines are explicit - "We do not use AI for direct article production. AI can be used as a research tool, but it is always the journalist who writes" - and Jensen was blunt about the distance between the rule and the practice: "We do not allow AI to write our articles. And we require that a human - a journalist - processes the input we get from the AI tools we use. Both of those rules were obviously not followed in this case." Berlingske did not catch the fabrication itself. A journalist at the rival daily Information did, by checking whether the named sources were real - the same verification step the paper's own guidance already required. The passage was removed, an external consultant was brought in to review the employee's other articles, and the employee was suspended on 27 May and returned to work the following month. Jensen said it would be self-deception to deny that the case damages Berlingske's credibility, and confirmed the paper will keep using AI tools, as most other media do. A summariser that invents experts does not do so out of malice - it fills a gap in the only register it has. Here the gap was created by a person who never attached the document, and it was closed by a competitor who checked the names. Source: https://www.berlingske.dk/business/berlingske-hjemsender-medarbejder-efter-fejlagtig-brug-af-ai-vaerktoej