As some readers may know, the Chronicle has been engaged in ongoing discussions with the editor and publisher of croton.news, an AI-driven site launched by local resident Matt Broudy around the end of March. We invited Broudy to publish a Guest Editorial explaining his project, which he did on April 9.
As we wrote at the time, we are strong supporters of freedom of the press and independent local journalism. But we did have concerns about the accuracy of the site, because from the very beginning croton.news produced a significant number of errors, ranging from misspellings of proper names, to errors of interpretation of news events, to more serious errors of fact.
To his credit, Broudy has engaged in a transparent conversation with us and other members of the community about what he was doing to improve the fidelity of the AI process. Broudy stressed that his site was experimental, a work-in-progress as it were, and that he was installing various fixes to lower the error rate.
Unfortunately, the number of errors has continued to be significant. That has raised concerns on our part about how responsible it is to continue to publish about our community events when it is almost guaranteed that incorrect information will go out into the community.
While the site continues to issue corrections whenever errors are spotted, readers would be required to check back on each story to make sure it was correct—something that they normally would not think to do.
Our latest discussion with Broudy was about the site’s report on the Board of Education candidates’ forum on April 23, held at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church. That report included several errors. It stated that 300 people had attended the event, when the room only holds roughly 100, even with standing room only. It misspelled the name of one of the moderators of the forum. It claimed that the candidates had “clashed” over technology issues when actually they were very polite and their differences were fairly nuanced. And it misspelled the name of the Croton-Harmon superintendent of schools, Stephen Walker, as “Dr. Bauer O'Shaugnessey.”
The site has since issued a correction, but the comments of a local teacher on the article indicate how serious the errors were:
Local Teacher 2026-04-29 22:01
Hi,
Thank you for bringing attention to this forum; unfortunately this article is riddled with errors.
I won’t go into the exact specifics, but they are egregious. For example though, it cites our Superintendent as Dr. Bauer O’Shaunessey... not Stephen Walker.
I clicked through to verify every single quote that citation was provided, and EVERY SINGLE ONE was wrong-- either the candidate did not say those words, or the quote is spoken by someone else entirely (which in an article espousing beliefs is highly problematic). For example, the citation about Jake Day saying that EdTech should be evaluated based on ESSA’s criteria, was actually put forward by Betsy Laird, which included her critique of the reading program...also attributed to Jake Day.
Please please please, verify your generations before you post them-- these are more than spelling errors, but factual inaccuracies.
The story on the April 23 forum has now been corrected, but the errors remained for a number of days before that happened.
After our most recent discussion with Broudy about the continuing errors on the site, he added a floating disclaimer to the bottom of the home page, which appears in very small print in both full screen laptop view and in smartphone view. Here, greatly enlarged for readability, is how it appears on the Chronicle’s MacAir:
We asked Broudy to comment for the record on the high error rate, and also asked him—as we have before—whether it might not be wiser and more responsible to hold back publication until he was sure the site was putting out highly accurate information. He responded as follows (we are quoting him in full):
As a journalist, your standard is editorial review prior to publication. As a developer building an automated data pipeline, my standard is continuous system improvement through real-world stress testing.
Croton.news is an experimental public records tool, not a traditional newsroom. In software development, deploying a system publicly—while clearly labeling it as a beta or experiment—is how you find and fix the edge cases, retrieval failures, and hallucination patterns that cannot be replicated in a closed environment.
I am not withholding the site because the goal is to build an automated system that surfaces local data accurately at scale. That requires public iteration. I am comfortable with the community seeing the system’s flaws during this phase because the transparency and user feedback are exactly what drive the system’s improvement.
No media outlet is perfect, of course, and the Chronicle has had to issue minor corrections from time to time. But over the course of 943 posts since we launched in October 2023 (including this one), we only have had to issue about a dozen corrections in all that time. That is about par for most media outlets, or better; publishing several errors in one article is not.
It doesn’t give us any pleasure to have to report on this situation, because normally we would welcome more systematic coverage of what goes on in the Croton community, especially of the many meetings that take place here. With the Chronicle’s limited resources, we can only cover a fraction of them ourselves,
We will let readers make up their own minds about croton.news and the extent to which they want to rely on it—or not—for information about what goes on in our community. Caveat emptor.
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AI. Don’t want it. Don’t need it. At least not most of the time. Certainly not to write letters or essays or papers.