Wednesday, December 10, 2025

Undermining credibility

From the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American :

When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”

“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”

comments: 2

Geo-B said...

Times are so ludicrous, they undermine satire.

Michael Leddy said...

I sometimes wonder, What would David Foster Wallace do? The current occupant is way beyond Johnny Gentle, the Las Vegas entertainer turned president in Infinite Jest.