John Scalzi is a voluble man. He is the author of several New York Times best sellers and has been nominated for nearly every major award that the science-fiction industry has to offer\u2014some of which he\u2019s won multiple times. Over the course of his career, he has written millions of words, filling dozens of books and 27 years\u2019 worth of posts on his personal blog. All of this is to say that if one wants to cite Scalzi, there is no shortage of material. But this month, the author noticed something odd: He was being quoted as saying things he\u2019d never said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe universe is a joke,\u201d reads a meme featuring his face. \u201cA bad one.\u201d The lines are credited to Scalzi and were posted, atop different pictures of him, to two Facebook communities boasting almost 1 million collective members. But Scalzi never wrote or said those words. He also never posed for the pictures that appeared with them online. The quote and the images that accompanied them were all \u201cpretty clearly\u201d AI generated, Scalzi wrote<\/a> on his blog. \u201cThe whole vibe was off,\u201d Scalzi told me. Although the material bore a superficial similarity to something he might have said\u2014\u201cit\u2019s talking about the universe, it\u2019s vaguely philosophical, I\u2019m a science-fiction writer\u201d\u2014it was not something he agreed with. \u201cI know what I sound like; I live with me all the time,\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n Bogus quotations on the internet are not new, but AI chatbots and their hallucinations have multiplied the problem at scale, misleading many more people, and misrepresenting the beliefs not just of big names such as Albert Einstein but also of lesser known individuals. In fact, Scalzi\u2019s experience caught my eye because a similar thing had happened to me. In June, a blog post appeared on the Times of Israel website, written by a self-described \u201ctech bro\u201d working in the online public-relations industry. Just about anyone can start a blog at the Times of Israel\u2014the publication generally does not edit or commission the contents\u2014which is probably why no one noticed that this post featured a fake quote, sourced to me and The Atlantic. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing inherently nefarious about advocating for your people\u2019s survival,\u201d it read. \u201cThe problem isn\u2019t that Israel makes its case. It\u2019s that so many don\u2019t want it made.\u201d<\/p>\n As with Scalzi, the words attributed to me were ostensibly adjacent to my area of expertise. I\u2019ve covered the Middle East for more than a decade, including countless controversies involving Israel, most recently the corrupt political bargain<\/a> driving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s actions<\/a> in Gaza. But like Scalzi, I\u2019d never said, and never would say, something so mawkish about the subject. I wrote to the Times of Israel, and an editor promptly apologized and took the article down. (Miriam Herschlag, the opinion and blogs editor at the paper, later told me that its blogging platform \u201cdoes not have an explicit policy on AI-generated content.\u201d)<\/p>\n Getting the post removed solved my immediate problem. But I realized that if this sort of thing was happening to me\u2014a little-known literary figure in the grand scheme of things\u2014it was undoubtedly happening to many more people. And though professional writers such as Scalzi and myself have platforms and connections to correct falsehoods attributed to us, most people are not so lucky. Last May, my colleagues Damon Beres and Charlie Warzel reported<\/a> on \u201cHeat Index,\u201d a magazine-style summer guide that was distributed by the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. The insert included a reading list with fake books attributed to real authors, and quoted one Mark Ellison, a nature guide, not a professional writer, who never said the words credited to him. When contacted, the author of \u201cHeat Index\u201d admitted to using ChatGPT to generate the material. Had The Atlantic never investigated, there likely would have been no one to speak up for Ellison.<\/p>\n