Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.
The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.
The author, Steven Rosenbaum, whose book “The Future of Truth” was released this month to great fanfare, incorporated more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes in sections of the book reviewed by The New York Times.
The Times asked Mr. Rosenbaum about the quotes on Sunday and Monday. On Monday night, Mr. Rosenbaum acknowledged in a statement that the book had “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” and said that he had started his own investigation.
He said that the inclusion of the incorrect quotes was an accident and that he had “no intention of fabricating any viewpoints” while writing the book.
IN AN AI PROMPT, ALWAYS INSIST ON SOURCES AND LINKS.
Whenever you use AI as a research assistant, subject-matter expert, or souped-up search engine, you need to grapple with the risk of hallucination—AI’s tendency to make up its own facts. Your first line of defense against these fabrications? More AI.
I now make a point of getting AI to check every fact it gives me. It still isn’t foolproof, and it is wise to use an actual flesh-and-blood human to fact-check anything you must get right. But using AI for a round of fact-checking can make the human fact-checking process go faster.
To start, before I even read AI-generated research, I get another AI to check its accuracy. I might use the same platform that generated my initial report, but I always start a brand-new session; otherwise the logic that influenced the initial report can influence the fact-checking process.
I set up this new session by harnessing the same sycophantic, people-pleasing tendencies that can make AI hallucinate in the first place. If the first AI created its own facts to please me, my AI fact-checker needs to please me by finding everywhere the first AI went wrong.
To unleash that nitpicking second AI, I start my fact-checking prompts with instructions like “You are a professor of journalism on your university’s ethics board, and it’s your job to investigate the work of a research team that’s been using AI to generate reports.” Or “You’re an auditor who has been hired to check the work of an internal data-analytics team that’s been using AI to compile customer data and sales prospects.” You get the idea. I want the second AI to be every employee’s nightmare.
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You can also set up your AI tools to accelerate the fact-checking process, for example by turning your favorite nitpicking prompt into an AI assistant (like a custom GPT or a Claude Project), so that you can give any first-draft AI research to that assistant, and get back a list of checked facts and a revised memo.
Or use Claude Code (or Claude Cowork) to spin up a whole team of fact-checkers: Tell the AI that once it has built a list of facts to check, it should assign those facts in small batches to a team of fact-checkers so that each fact gets checked by at least two different AIs, and where needed, a third tiebreaker. When an AI fact-checker hands out this work in simultaneous batches to its many virtual helpers, even a detailed research brief can get verified (and corrected) quite quickly.