An author who is wringing his hands over the death of truth at the hands of AI has basically said, ‘My failings prove my book right!’
Yesterday, I wrote about my experience using AI as a writing assistant. The experiment wasn’t born out of a sudden urge to use AI, but rather, to have first hand experience using AI that I so often criticize. The overwhelming conclusion I came to was that AI not only ballooned the amount of work to produce a single article from a one day process to a nearly one week process (which wound up being spread across a period of over a month as I struggled to cram the time babysitting AI into my already busy schedule of content production), but actually encouraged me to be lazy and let AI mistakes fly in the process.
The experiment took me one test article to figure this out. Did I have prior knowledge that AI was faulty? Sure. Did I need that prior knowledge? Probably not. This is because I actually checked what changes were made by the AI instead of blindly trusting it. That is all I would’ve really needed to determine that it wasn’t worth it to me to incorporate AI into my writing. As the length of the article implied, it was long, tedious, boring, and added way too much for such little value. Others, however, didn’t learn this lesson.
As I’ve enjoyed posting repeatedly over the last few years, AI has burned many people in their quest to take a workload shortcut. Examples of this I’ve tracked include lawyers getting in trouble for fake AI inserted citations in legal briefs, the CNET scandal, the Gannet Scandal, bad “journalism” predictions, fake news stories, more fake stories, Google recommending people eating rocks, the 15% success rate story, bad chess tactics, the Chicago Sun-Times scandal, a Canadian team submitting fake legal citations in their legal briefs, other attorneys submitting fake citation filled legal documents, the 91% failure rate story, AI deleting user data, the lawyer who got fined $10,000 over a bogus AI written legal brief, AI killing workplace productivity with workslop, AI having an 81% failure rate in summarizing news content, AI Overview giving out bad health advice, AI only being able to successfully complete 2.5% of commission work successfully at best, AI slowing software development down by 19%, AI hallucinating in even more court documents, AI being bad at poker, AI slop flooding the scientific community, AI causing a surge in medical mistakes, AI causing the Amazon outage by deleting the code environment, AI leading to burnout, Amazon getting burned by AI, Canadian immigration documents getting wrongly rejected due to AI hallucinations and another lawyer getting fined $10,000 for submitting a fake AI legal brief.
As I say so often after producing such lists, the last item won’t be the last time someone gets burned by AI. It’s an extremely safe bet and is ultimately the gift that keeps on giving. A few days ago, I ran across this article about how someone produced a book called “The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality”. It was basically an author wringing his hands about how kids are going to live in a post truth society thanks to AI. It’s very obvious the author hasn’t been paying attention to modern society because the Trump administration has done that well enough on his own. AI was definitely not needed for that. Still, it was just another “kids these days” moral panic pushed by boomer led mainstream media outlets to encourage fist shaking at clouds.
The irony, however, is the fact that the author that so freaked out over AI was, himself, using AI to write that book. As you can tell where this is all going, yes, the AI faked quotes and the author seemingly didn’t bother double checking those quotes to make sure that they were actually said. Hilarity ensues! From Futurism:
Truth in the age of AI, indeed.
A buzzy new book called “The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality” contains more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes,” a review by The New York Times discovered. In response to questions from the paper, the author, Steven Rosenbaum, admitted that the book contained a “handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” stemming from his use of AI tools.
“As I disclosed in the book’s acknowledgments, I used AI tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process,” Rosenbaum told the NYT. “That does not excuse these errors, of which I take full responsibility. I am now working with the editors to thoroughly review and quickly correct any affected passages; any future editions will be corrected.”
So, let me get this straight: you are flipped out over the use of AI, yet you yourself, in your manifesto railing against AI, use AI yourself and made the writing rookie mistake of not double-checking the work you didn’t write? The irony here is off the charts.
The New York Times article in question, which can be read here, also had the author defending his actions at the end of the article:
While the first part of that quote is accurate, Mr. McIntyre said that he had not said the second part verbatim. All of the ideas in quotes flagged by The Times, he said, are “concordant with my work.”
“It’s the ‘societal value’ part this looks wonky to me,” Mr. McIntyre said in an email to The Times. “One might say that about my work, without the quotation marks, and I think it would be OK. I just have never, to my knowledge, used that phrase.”
In his statement, Mr. Rosenbaum said that if the episode “serves as a warning about the risks of A.I.-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.”
“These A.I. errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises about truth, trust and A.I. and its impact on society, democracy and editorial,” he added.
The excuses are quickly unravelling for the author of the book. No, that is not just further proof of the dangers of AI. That is proof off hypocrisy.
I’m not alone in saying how stupid this whole affair is. Mike Masnick of TechDirt also commented on this whole affair as well:
Dude. No. Just… no.
You don’t get to write an entire book fretting about how the kids these days don’t understand truth because of AI… and then when its exposed that you didn’t even check the quotes AI gave you, claim that this just proves your point.
That’s not how any of this works.
This is a book called “The Future of Truth.” It seems like you should at least grapple with the fact that part of the “future of truth” is that your own book is spreading false information because you didn’t… actually write parts of it.
If anything, it seems likely that kids are learning whatever lesson there is to be learned here way better than the adults. The widespread disdain many kids have for AI is, in part, a direct response to all the bullshit ways adults are using it. I will continue to argue that LLMs are a tool that, when properly used, can be quite empowering. But the absolute worst way to use these tools is to let them do your primary work for you. They can help assist you, but anyone who is relying on them as a lazy way of doing the deeper work you need to do will run into problems.
But I don’t think any of that has to do with how “the kids these days” “understand truth.” A lot of it has to do with how adults are rushing around looking for shortcuts and schemes to get away from doing the actual work. But apparently there’s no book deal or Wired feature story in “the kids these days are probably figuring it out just fine.”
The scheme here is pretty obvious: take advantage of the moral panics of the day to make a fast buck off of old people who don’t understand technology. It happened with Jonathan Haidt when he scammed millions into believing the moral panic about social media and mental health of children and Steven Rosenbaum attempted this very same scam with his book, thinking he could also leverage fear mongering for his own personal benefit as well. The difference was that Rosenbaum got caught early on.
One thing is for sure, AI has been overhyped to the moon. That is not in doubt. At the same time, the moral panic about AI taking over everything as it reaches sentience is also something that has been overhyped to the moon. At the end of the day, we’re dealing with crappy technology that has little to no shot at fulfilling the wild promises by people fuelling the hype machine. If you are flipped out about about living in a post-truth society, then you should be looking at the current occupant of the White House who is slashing science funding and trying to warp the US and the world beyond all recognition in the process. AI doesn’t come close to the damage caused by the current political reality on that front.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.
Discover more from Freezenet.ca
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
