Author Steven Rosenbaum used AI tools to research his book on AI and truth, but a New York Times investigation found the tools generated fake quotes that made it into print.

A New York Times investigation identified six problematic citations in Rosenbaum's book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, including three so-called "synthetic quotes" with no apparent source. Tech reporter Kara Swisher said she "never said" one quote, and Northeastern University professor Lisa Feldman Barrett said quotes attributed to her "don't appear in [my] book, and they are also wrong."

Rosenbaum used AI tools including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude to "surface ideas, locate articles, summarize themes, identify people or papers" during research, tagging AI-generated notes with warnings before passing them to a fact-checker and two copy editors. He draws a distinction between this research phase and "actual reporting, narrative structure, interviews, arguments, and conclusions in the book," which he says are "entirely mine."

Despite the error, Rosenbaum told Ars he is "not interested in going back to the AI-free research process" and finds AI "magical" because it "connects, it knits together ideas and gives you pathways to think about things that you're not going to come up with on your own," though he says he has "learned a lesson" and will be "much more suspicious" of AI outputs going forward.