Wired: We Asked the Future of Truth Author to Explain How He Used AI. It Didn't Go Well

[highplainsdem]

This article follows up on the May 19 story about a book getting a lot of attention that turned out to have AI-generated errors the author hadn't bothered to look for and correct, though his book was about "The Future of Truth" in the age of AI.

LBN thread from the 19th, for background:

Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143667143

Tech magazine Wired had already run an excerpt from the book. They examined the excerpt again after the NYT broke the story, found that the quotes and facts in it were correct, but they wondered if the excerpt itself had been AI-generated. They have a policy against publishing AI-generated text.

Their story today

https://www.wired.com/story/future-of-truth-ai-interview/

describes their difficult conversation with the book author as they tried to get more information from him, after AI-detection tools they used to check the excerpt all showed it was likely AI-generated.

He didn't want to talk about the AI detectors' analyses at all, compared it to a "Have you stopped beating your wife?" style loaded question.

He said he didn't remember whether any passages in the book had been copied from AI and then lightly edited. He said Wired was "looking for a smoking gun, and there isn’t one."

Rosenbaum said that writers who “wake up in the morning wanting to have ideas” are now “living in fear, and it’s not healthy for democracy.” Before I could ask what exactly that meant, he went on: “I talked to another author this morning who's literally got a book coming out going to the publisher in a month, and she's fucking terrified.”

I asked if that was because she used AI in the process of writing the book.

“Of course. You say this with an accusatory tone, like she used a cheating tool.” He mentioned a report that places AI adoption among journalists at 82 percent. He said that WIRED’s generative AI policy is restrictive and hypothesized that our writers likely use AI in secret.

-snip-

When I told Rosenbaum that the way he used AI made me doubt the book’s accuracy and overall quality, he again brought up the study about journalists’ embrace of AI. “If 82 percent of journalists are using AI every day, then what you’re saying is you now have anxiety about the accuracy and reliability of essentially everything that is in the current media ecosystem,” he said.

The 82% figure had come from a MuckRack study that had counted things like using AI for transcription. Only a quarter of journalists were using AI for writing assistance. Apparently Rosenbaum wants to believe the majority of journalists use AI the way he does, but they don't.

And although he never clearly admitted parts of his book might simply have been copied from chatbot responses and then edited, Wired retracted the excerpt they'd published.