Lucy Komisar

Lucy Komisar        (journalist)
Nationality	US
Member of	Council on Foreign Relations/Members 2
Interests	• Counter-Guerrilla • Bill Browder • Alexei Navalny • Tax haven
New York City-based investigative journalist and drama critic. CFR

Lucy Komisar is a New York City-based investigative journalist and drama critic.

Navalny Documentary

In March 2023, Komisar wrote an article criticizing the documentary film Navalny, winner of the 2023 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film about Russian politician Alexei Navalny, the piece was picked up in Russian media such as Meduza.

Fabrication

According to Vice "investigative news outlet The Grayzone recently published an article that included AI-generated text as a source for its information. The piece, “Oscar-winning ‘Navalny’ documentary is packed with misinformation” by Lucy Komisar, included hyperlinks to PDFs uploaded to the author’s personal website that appear to be screenshots of conversations she had with ChatSonic, a free generative AI chatbot that advertises itself as a ChatGPT alternative that can “write factual trending content” using Google search results. Komisar admitted in an interview with Motherboard that the article "included several bad links, but not disinformation.

Komisar explained ChatSonic said Navalny was never poisoned with nerve agent Novichok but diagnosed with said diseases, and upon requesting sources for these claims, the AI chat app send her links to The Moscow Times and The Guardian, which were a made up link from 2014 that didn't exist, and the home page of the TMT. Komisar originally published the piece on her personal blog before The Grayzone picked it up. After it went live on The Grayzone, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins pointed out Komisar’s use of AI on Twitter.

After Higgins’ Twitter thread, The Grayzone updated its version of the article and removed the links to AI. “We've amended this review, republished from an outside writer that used a few improper sources: 2 claims were removed, 2 were adjusted to include proper sourcing,” Max Blumental, editor of The Grayzone, said on Twitter. The Grayzone later deleted the article; Komisar said she asked for the story to be deleted and noted that a version of it is still up on her website. Following Higgins his tweets getting picked up in the media, in a statement to Motherboard, Komisar admitted that the links to AI scripts are a problem. On her own version of the piece, she replaced the links. She then called Higgins a CIA asset. Komisar denied ever using ChatsSonic before in the Motherboard interview, and promised to not do it again, but argued using it because she copied information from a Moscow-based journalist that "didn't have links" thinking "ChatSonic" must be more neutral.

Interestingly enough, ChatSonic removed any support for Komisar's "nautrality" claim as ChatSonic changed their answer upon new users requesting what Bellingcat is. Previously BC was named somewhat of a western front group.

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