In 1938, Orson Welles, a famous Hollywood actor and director, aired a theatrical production of “The War of the Worlds” on the radio. It scared many listeners who didn’t realize that it was a theatrical broadcast. Americans thought they were listening to the news until the very end.
Welles said this to reassure a nation that had panicked at a fake Martian invasion:
We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the C. B. S. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian…it’s Hallowe’en.
Welles and his cohorts used a popular modern technology (for the time) to play a successful prank.
There was another instance just a few days ago of a writer using popular modern technology. However, his submission was not a prank, and Americans can once again learn a valuable lesson from this flub.
It’s that time of year when newspapers publish their summer reading lists for those who are heading out on vacation and want to enjoy a relaxing book. One particular summer reading list that was printed in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer listed 15 books, complete with descriptions of what the reader could expect them to be about.
There was just one major problem. It turns out that 10 of the 15 books don’t even exist.
Andy Weir, author of The Martian, doesn’t have an upcoming book titled The Last Algorithm. Isabel Allende doesn’t have a new climate fiction novel titled Tidewater Dreams.
For the astute reader out there, you may have already figured out that this list was generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The writer, Marco Buscaglia (though can we call him a “writer” if AI does all the work for him?), has admitted to using AI to complete this reading list. So what happened?
He apparently didn’t even read the list before submitting it to his employer, who provides licensed content for papers like the Chicago Sun-Times. In an email to NPR, Buscaglia conceded, “Huge mistake on my part and has nothing to do with the Sun-Times. They trust that the content they purchase is accurate and I betrayed that trust. It’s on me 100 percent.”
While this is far from the first time media companies and journalists have been caught using AI-generated content, this particular example highlights precisely why using AI isn’t the shortcut it purports to be. AI cannot source perfectly, which means it has trouble actually looking for books that are coming out within the next few months. AI also isn’t bound by reality; it just makes up what it doesn’t know — like a mostly fabricated summer reading list. AI is only as good as the info put into it, so if garbage goes in, garbage comes out.
AI is an amazing tool, but when someone uses it to substitute for their own brain work, it will fail them.
That’s one reason why writers at The Patriot Post are still typing away at their desks, bringing you their authentic thoughts and opinions without using AI as a shortcut or a crutch. The lesson that can be learned by all Americans here is that AI isn’t going to be an effective surrogate for the human brain. It still needs to be double-checked. Ironically, isn’t that ultimately defeating the purpose of the AI shortcut?
