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Rosenbaum used AI tools during his writing process, he told me, \u201cto surface ideas, locate articles, summarize themes, identify people or papers I might want to look into.\u201d He draws a hard line between this kind of research and the \u201cactual reporting, narrative structure, interviews, arguments, and conclusions in the book,\u201d which he says are \u201centirely mine\u2026 There was never a time when AI was writing the book.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to chapters based on transcribed interviews that Rosenbaum says he conducted himself, The Future of Truth<\/em> also includes more research-based chapters in which Rosenbaum said, \u201cWe\u2019re pulling facts and then knitting them together into a narrative.\u201d Tools like OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and Anthropic\u2019s Claude were used heavily to gather information, he said, with any nuggets mined by those tools tagged with a \u201cthis came from AI\u201d warning in his notes.<\/p>\n It\u2019s strangely creative and crafty and unusual in all these ways \u2026 and then it betrays you in ways that are just really quite\u00a0horrible.<\/p>\n Steven Rosenbaum<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Those tagged AI-generated notes were then passed on to a fact-checker and two copy editors provided by the publisher, Rosenbaum said. Of the 285 outside citations in the book, six have been identified by the Times as problematic, including three so-called \u201csynthetic quotes\u201d that have no apparent source. (More examples could turn up as the book undergoes further review. And it\u2019s worth noting that most writers manage to include zero<\/em> made-up quotes when they write a book.)<\/p>\n \u201cI think we did that [double-checking] incredibly effectively, but not a hundred percent,\u201d Rosenbaum told Ars. \u201cWe\u2019re doing the work, we\u2019re doing the best we can. We look at it, it looks right. We double-check it, and then we made a mistake.\u201d<\/p>\n But the significant failure here highlights how the traditional fact-checking process might be ill-equipped to handle AI-assisted research. In the past, a fact-checker could be reasonably confident that any author quoting cited written works had simply copied down those quotes directly. These quotes would need to be checked, of course, but the fact that they\u2019re so easy to verify makes them less inherently suspicious. If AI tools are involved anywhere in the pipeline, though, that assumption goes out the window, and there needs to be an extra layer of skepticism that those quotes had been copied correctly or that they even exist at all.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n