Book About AI's Effects on the 'Future of Truth' Found to Contain AI-Hallucinated Quotes

Steven Rosenbaum's The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality — a buzzy book about how AI distorts reality — turns out to contain more than a half-dozen misattributed or fabricated quotes, discovered by a New York Times review. Rosenbaum admitted he used ChatGPT and Claude during research and writing, and is now working with editors to correct the affected passages.

Among the hallucinated quotes was one falsely attributed to tech journalist Kara Swisher, placed in a chapter about AI lies, in which she supposedly mused that language models are "like a mirror" that reflects "our own morality back at us, polished and articulate, but ultimately empty behind the surface." The real Swisher told the NYT she "never said that," adding that the quote made her "sound like I have a stick up my butt, according to ChatGPT." Rosenbaum, who holds a self-described "Masters Degree in Truth" from NYU, suggested the whole fiasco was a teaching moment — which is one way to describe writing the book on post-AI truth while not fact-checking your AI-generated quotes.