Report: “Media Personalities Stumble as ChatGPT Invents Presidential Pardon History”
From The Decoder:
Ana Navarro-Cardenas claimed on X that President Woodrow Wilson pardoned his brother-in-law Hunter deButts—a person who, according to Lopatto, never existed. Navarro-Cardenas is known as a commentator on CNN and The View. Esquire and other media outlets spreaded similar misinformation, stating that George H.W. Bush pardoned his son Neil and Jimmy Carter pardoned his brother Billy. While the source of these claims remains unclear, Navarro-Cardenas cited ChatGPT as her source.
When asked about presidential pardons, the chatbot consistently provides false information, according to Lopatto. Google Gemini and Perplexity also return incorrect answers at times, with these systems generating unverified facts.
Learn More, Read the Complete Article
See Also: Stop Using Generative AI as a Search Engine (via The Verge)
Even using ChatGPT to help with the writing process is risky. Ask Jeff Hancock, the founder of the Stanford Social Media Lab and a well-known misinformation researcher. A legal document he filed had cited sources that didn’t exist. Hancock insists he wrote the document himself, but he used GPT-4o to write its citation list, resulting in two made-up citations and one citation that had the wrong authors attached.
Now, a defender of AI might — rightly — say that a real journalist should check the answers provided by ChatGPT; that fact-checking is a critical part of our job. I agree, which is why I’ve walked you through my own checking in this article. But these are only the public and embarrassing examples of something I think is happening much more often in private: a normal person is using ChatGPT and trusting the information it gives them.
Filed under: News
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
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