Nota, an AI company that counts The Boston Globe and the Institute for Nonprofit News among its clients, has scrapped its entire network of 11 local news sites after Poynter and Axios Richmond discovered more than 70 stories containing plagiarized reporting, writing, and photographs from local journalists. Without attribution. For six months.

The pitch was noble enough: bring bilingual local reporting and civic tools to underserved communities. The reality was two part-time editors using AI to churn out articles across 11 county-focused sites. The articles were supposed to be based on public civic information like press releases and city council meeting videos. What they actually contained was reporting stolen from local newsrooms.

And here is where it gets truly embarrassing: some of the plagiarized content came from outlets that were paying Nota as clients. Nexstar, for example, had a $600,000 deal with Nota. Poynter found three stories containing reporting lifted from two Nexstar stations. The company that was supposed to help local news was literally stealing from its own customers.

CEO Josh Brandau initially called the takedown a pause made out of an abundance of caution. Thirty minutes into his interview with Poynter, he changed his mind and confirmed the sites would not reopen. The editor responsible for several plagiarized sites, Jorge Rodriguez, was fired. He admitted using other reporters' work to generate articles and offered a sincere apology. His defense? It was not a traditional newsroom environment and lacked clear editorial guidelines.

That defense tells you everything you need to know about where AI-generated journalism stands right now. The technology makes it trivially easy to produce content at scale. But nobody has solved the part where that content needs to be original, attributed, and ethical. The humans in the loop were supposed to be the guardrail. They were the weakest link.

This is not the first time AI news has hit this wall. The NYT fired a freelancer last week for AI-assisted plagiarism. But Nota is different because it was not a rogue freelancer. It was the company's entire business model. The sites launched with a Microsoft partnership and a press release touting the future of local journalism. Six months later, they are gone.

The promise of AI fixing local news deserts is real. Thousands of communities in America have lost their newspapers. But the solution cannot be AI that copies the remaining journalists who are still doing the work. That is not saving local news. That is killing it faster.

First reported by Poynter and Axios Richmond.