AI is just not right

Almost half of it Americans say they use AI to find information and generate ideas. It’s not hard to understand why. As social media turns into slop—and Google into a glorified landing page for Reddit threads and content farms—most of us are hungry for something reliable. Plus, chatbots are like that helpfulnot true? The first time I interacted with one, I asked him if he knew this was a huge drain on resources. Half an hour later I had a new recipe for vegan cream cheese.

I have never tried the recipe. Instead, I found a man-made one that the LLM may have scraped off. Of course, this is how these models work. They package collective knowledge into something that feels tailored to you. This may be fine for dairy alternatives (unless you’re a vegan blogger). But on the order of the world, and Truth— the focus of my role as a fact-checker at WIRED — the stakes are exponentially higher.

Over the last year or so, more and more people have looked at me with great pity. Certainly a…