I am really confused about this article and responses. We ALL knew this was coming years ago. Fake news, faked photos, faked videos have been out there for EONS. Kids in school have been using AI to create term papers that don't pass the fact-check. And AI has "hallucinated" since the beginning. Now people are shocked when a news outlet doesn't double-check the sources...

I am increasingly convinced that a significant fraction of the population (or possibly _everyone_, a significant fraction of time) ignores content and relies solely on form to assess what they are being told. If something is structured properly, they will accept it, no matter how absurd.

LLMs take advantage of this and produce things that are sufficiently similar statistically to what's expected that people's critical facilities just shut down (or are never engaged in the first place). They apparently seem perfectly cogent when even a moment's thought would show they are utter bilge.

This is a great article, and it has AI in the title, but imo it has nothing to do with AI. In fact, it doesn’t even claim to have any evidence of AI being involved there.

What the article is really about is the sad state of ethics and care at some of (previously known as) the more trusted publications.

It wasn’t really about AI, but more about big publications doing absolutely zero due diligence and willing to publish stories centered around towns that don’t even exist, with writers themselves using a fake name that never existed, citing people who never existed, talking about some murder mysteries that never happened. Every single part of the story was fabricated.