Peter Vandermeersch, a senior journalist and fellow at Mediahuis, has been suspended after admitting he used AI tools like ChatGPT to generate quotes for his Substack newsletter, which he then published as his own. The Dutch publisher confirmed the suspension following an investigation by its own title, NRC, which found Vandermeersch had published dozens of false quotes. NRC alleged that seven individuals quoted in Vandermeersch's posts stated they never made the statements attributed to them.

Vandermeersch acknowledged he 'wrongly put words into people’s mouths' and that his use of AI resulted in 'hallucinations' – AI-generated errors – which he failed to verify. He admitted to summarizing reports with tools including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s NotebookLM, then publishing the AI output without proper human oversight. The experienced journalist, who previously led Irish operations for Mediahuis and wrote about press freedom, stated he had wanted to experiment with AI extensively but now recognizes his approach was fundamentally flawed.