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The A.V. Club’s AI-Generated Articles Are Copying Directly From IMDb

Futurism's September 2023 investigation found exact and near-exact IMDb wording in several A.V. Club Bot articles. The A.V. Club disclosed AI compilation and editorial review, while G/O Media said it licensed IMDb data and used AI to recommend copy.
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Futurism reported on September 13, 2023, that A.V. Club Bot articles contained movie descriptions matching IMDb word for word or very closely. Its reporters, Frank Landymore and Jon Christian, presented side-by-side examples involving Young Adam, Meg 2: The Trench and Jessica Frost. The reporting documents text overlap in specific articles; it does not establish that every A.V. Club Bot article copied IMDb, that a court found plagiarism, or that IMDb’s licensing terms were violated.

What Futurism’s comparison showed

Futurism reviewed A.V. Club Bot listicles and compared their movie summaries with descriptions on IMDb. The strongest examples were verbatim matches:

  • Young Adam: The description in an A.V. Club list of NC-17-rated films matched IMDb’s wording exactly.
  • Meg 2: The Trench: An August movie-release list reproduced IMDb’s description exactly.
  • Jessica Frost: Futurism identified a close rewording of IMDb’s description rather than a purely independent summary.

Futurism said the August-release and NC-17 lists it examined added no meaningful framing beyond the movie descriptions themselves. The comparisons were reported by Futurism; the specific pages were not independently archived or audited for this account.

What the A.V. Club disclosed

The articles carried a note that Futurism quoted, and TheWrap also reported in its August 8, 2023 coverage:

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“This article is based on data from IMDb. Text was compiled by an AI engine that was then reviewed and edited by the editorial staff.”

That disclosure identifies IMDb as the data source, says an AI engine compiled the text, and describes editorial review. It does not specify the software, prompts, model, amount of rewriting, or which passages were changed by editors.

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How G/O Media described the system

Futurism reported that a G/O Media spokesperson said the company licensed IMDb content. In a follow-up explanation, the spokesperson said:

“our AI system leverages licensed data to recommend copy that is reviewed by editorial.”

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That account portrays the system as a search-and-recommendation tool drawing on licensed material, with editors responsible for review. The statements do not establish the system’s technical design or prove how much human editing occurred in any particular article. The underlying license terms were not published in the reporting reviewed here, so readers cannot determine from these statements alone what reuse the agreement permitted.

Exact copying, paraphrase and legal conclusions are different claims

Question What the reported evidence supports
Was there verbatim overlap? Futurism showed exact wording for Young Adam and Meg 2: The Trench.
Was there close paraphrase? Futurism described a near-match for Jessica Frost.
Did the articles identify their source? The A.V. Club Bot note said the articles were based on IMDb data and compiled by AI before editorial review.
Was the material licensed? G/O Media said it licensed IMDb content; the contract was not made public.
Was infringement or plagiarism adjudicated? Not established by the cited reporting. No court or regulator decision is identified.

Those distinctions matter. A documented text match is evidence about particular passages, not a finding about every article or a legal ruling about ownership and permission.

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What happened inside G/O Media

TheWrap reported that G/O Media editorial director Merrill Brown sent a staff memo after AI material published in July 2023. Addressing the volume of feedback, Brown wrote:

“The best way to deal with industry chatter of this kind is to process it, dismiss the trivial and learn from what surfaces that’s thoughtful and of real value.”

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The memo shows that the publishing controversy reached the company’s editorial leadership, but it does not provide an audit of the A.V. Club Bot articles or resolve the questions about sourcing and editing raised by Futurism’s examples.

What the A.V. Club’s current AI policy says

The A.V. Club’s current AI Policy page is surfaced in search results as saying that AI authorship is forbidden and that each published word is human-generated. The wording also allows administrative tools such as analytics dashboards and spelling or grammar checkers. Because the page was not available for direct inspection here, its adoption date and compliance procedures are not established. The present wording also cannot, by itself, show what happened in 2023 or prove compliance with the policy.

What can—and cannot—be concluded

  • Futurism presented concrete examples of exact and near-exact overlap between A.V. Club Bot copy and IMDb descriptions.
  • The published disclosure acknowledged IMDb data, AI compilation and editorial review.
  • G/O Media said it had a license and that AI recommended copy from licensed data for editors to review.
  • The available reporting does not show the license, quantify the number of matching articles, identify a specific AI model, or establish the extent of human rewriting.
  • It does not support saying that all A.V. Club Bot articles copied IMDb or that a legal authority ruled the conduct unlawful.

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