Even after being caught — and viciously criticized — for using AI to write his book about AI, one writer says he’s not giving up on the tech.
While many AI writing scandals center on the artistic sin of letting a machine dictate your creative process, the offense committed by Steven Rosenbaum, the author of “The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality,” was a journalistic one. A recent investigation by The New York Times found that his book contained more than a half dozen fabricated or misattributed quotes, after certain individuals “quoted” in the book came forward to confirm that they never said what Rosenbaum claimed they did. These turned out to be AI hallucinations, with Rosenbaum admitting to the paper that he used tools like ChatGPT and Claude while researching, writing, and editing the book.
Now, after the storm of controversy those extremely ironic revelations sparked — the book, after all, is explicitly about how AI affects our shared notion of the truth — Rosenbaum says he had “learned a lesson” and will be “much more suspicious” of AI outputs going forward. Except you really have to wonder what lesson he’s really taking away from all this, because he also said he was never going back to the old-fashioned, AI-free writing process.
“The idea of taking X years off [from AI] while it sorts itself out, and going back to, like, Microsoft Word… it’s just not in my nature,” Rosenbaum told Ars Technica in an interview in the wake of the debacle. “[AI] is magical. Because it connects, it knits together ideas and gives you pathways to think about things that you’re not going to come up with on your own.”
Throughout the interview, Rosenbaum described his AI helpers in tellingly anthropomorphic fashion, including calling AI a “delightful writing companion.”
“When I say ‘writing companion,’ I don’t use that lightly,” he told the outlet. “It’s strangely creative and crafty and unusual in all these ways… and then it betrays you in ways that are just really quite horrible.”
It was hard not to wonder about tech’s addictive potential as Rosenbaum rationalized his AI habit with bizarre analogies. He compared weighing the tech’s benefits and risks to what a drug addict or alcoholic might ask themselves, while asserting he’s “never been in a place where I thought the tech that I was using was both intoxicating and dangerous.”
Rosenbaum also compared using AI to his decision to ride a bicycle but not a motorcycle. When the interviewer questioned Rosenbaum’s framing of AI as the safer “bicycle” option, since AI’s accelerated productivity comes with a clear risk of errors that would make it seem more like a motorcycle, Rosenbaum had to concede that the interviewer’s point “might be fair.”
Rosenbaum isn’t alone in his error. Scandals have erupted around a number of books and stories this year after they were accused of being written with the help of AI, including a horror novel that ended up being pulled by its publisher. Newsrooms have also been caught up in AI controversy, as when both the NYT and Ars published articles that accidentally included quotes that turned out to be AI summaries or fabrications instead of what the attributed person had said verbatim.
But Rosenbaum’s blunder is particularly egregious, and not only because of the topic of his book. This is meant to be a work of non-fiction bolstered by commentary from industry experts, that went through multiple rounds of editing and fact-checking, and was picked up by a major publisher. Has the gravity of this dawned on Rosenbaum? He didn’t sound particularly critical of himself.
“I think we did that [double-checking] incredibly effectively, but not a hundred percent,” Rosenbaum told Ars. “We’re doing the work, we’re doing the best we can. We look at it, it looks right. We double-check it, and then we made a mistake.”
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