The Times took a close look at the book and found more than a half-dozen misattributed or completely made-up quotes concocted by A.I., including one stemwinder from the tech journalist Kara Swisher. It wasn’t just wrong, Swisher said, but “I also sound like I have a stick up my butt.” Rosenbaum acknowledged the delusions, telling our reporter that if the hallucination “serves as a warning about the risks of A.I.-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.” Times readers are having a field day in the comments:
You can’t trust the machines — not always, not often. Of course, they’re getting better. Yes, they’ll make many things easier. (Yesterday, Google announced that it will overhaul the search bar it has used for the past 25 years to accommodate longer, more complex questions answered by A.I. Say, “Explain the theory of relativity to me as if I were a child.”) But they’re also changing life in uncomfortable ways, altering our relationship with truth and just generally disorientating people: That car on the road next to me has no driver.
That’s one reason graduating students at the University of Arizona last week booed their commencement speaker, the former Google leader Eric Schmidt. He had been talking about the vast promise of A.I. to transform the world through technology. Graduates didn’t want to hear it.
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