The Future of Truth: How AI Reshaped Steven Rosenbaum’s Reality

“A book about truth needs to be truthful.” — Steven Rosenbaum

 

In April, the New York City based tech impresario Steven Rosenbaum came on the show to discuss The Future of Truth, his then new book about artificial intelligence. He warned that AI is a spectacularly good liar and that we should be concerned about the future of truth. A few weeks later, The New York Times reported that the book contained untrue quotations — among them one (mis)attributed to the notable tech journalist Kara Swisher.

 

No, you couldn’t make this story up (if you did, it would be called a lie). Not surprisingly, the world’s leading expert on truth (which he still claims to be) got mocked everywhere from Wired to the Daily Beast. But taking a leaf perhaps out of his fellow New Yorkers Roy Cohn and Donald Trump’s playbook, Rosenbaum has fought back. He claimed that these fake quotes came from ChatGPT, and spent the summer meticulously rewriting the book to eliminate its errors.

 

Rosenbaum is unusually frank about it. Even unapologetic. Defiantly so. He says he gave ChatGPT his own interview transcripts and asked for pull quotes, assuming that a machine given primary sources would return what was in them. Instead, he says, ChatGPT went rogue and decided it could improve a few of them. That said, Rosenbaum takes full responsibility for the original book. He admits he dropped the ball, and — for the first time publicly — thanks the New York Times reporter who wrote the original story. He also stripped every endorsement off the new edition, including Maria Ressa’s introduction, so that none of his illustrious friends might be embarrassed by the brouhaha.

 

I gave the masochist a hard time anyway. He didn’t much enjoy the comparison with Roy Cohn. But I meant it as a compliment. Declare victory and move on was the Cohnian mantra which he taught the current American President. And that’s exactly what Rosenbaum has done with this crazy AI story. What chutzpah! And it’s all true. Kind of.

 

Further Reading:

 

•       The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality by Steven Rosenbaum (Matt Holt Books) — the corrected second edition, with two new chapters, now on presale.

•       Benjamin Mullin’s New York Times report on the fabricated quotations, and Will Oremus’s follow-up in The Atlantic — both discussed here.

•       Prof Joe Cruz from Williams College arguing in the New York Times that teaching students to think need not mean teaching them to write — the controversial piece that opens the conversation.

•       Earlier this week on Keen On: Sherry Turkle on what we become when we talk to machines.

•       The Sustainable Media Center, which Steven Rosenbaum runs, and whose board includes fifty Gen Z members.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       What Actually Happened. The errors were specific and few. Benjamin Mullin of the New York Times — who, as Rosenbaum notes drily, had the temerity to actually read the book he was writing about — found three. One was a misattributed citation on a quotation Meredith Broussard confirms she did say. The others were worse: text that appeared inside quotation marks and had never been spo