Is it live, or is it Memorex?

And if you're old enough for that one, you're old enough to have seen a lot of human-induced headline errors, so have another Big Orange and contemplate the mysteries of headline blunders in the age of generative AI.

My first thought on "U.S. strikes shipping point on Red Sea," on the front page of my morning paper,* was that this is the sort of thing Google Gemini might suggest if you asked it for a summary. It's grammatically identical to the top of the lede (subject-verb-DO-PP), but it also makes pragmatic sense: The U.S. is something that does striking in the text, and a "shipping chokepoint"** on the Red Sea is something that striking was done to. And it's completely, bassackwardly, delightfully wrong:

DUBAI -- U.S. missiles struck targets across Iran, reaching as far as its Caspian coast, on July 24 after President Donald Trump vowed “major military punishment” for Tehran and its Houthi allies in Yemen for extending the war to a second major shipping chokepoint, the mouth of the Red Sea.

But is it uniquely AI? Well, that would entail a perfect world in which no human headline writer had ever added 2 to 2 and put 3.14159 in the headline. Yes, in the Old Days, there would have been a book called an "atlas" on the desk that would show you how far the Caspian Sea is from the Gulf of Aden, and a person called a "slot" who would yell naughty things if you failed to use it -- and mistakes would still get by. (This is, after all, the paper that once turned the AP's perfectly good "Palestinian speaking Hebrew" into a "Palestinian-speaking Hebrew").

So I don't know. I think I'd like to blame it on AI, and to envision the demons chuckling and yelling as they welcomed the author of Gannett's AI policy, but I'd almost be relieved to find out that there were still humans doing human things in Gannett hubs. (And it'll be fun to see how long it takes a pledge to correct "all errors of fact" to catch up with this one.)

* Yes, it's the pdf version, but it's a good index of how much attention the Freep, and Gannett in general, put into the vestigial print product.
** Close enough for jazz, right?