Let me put it plainly: AI is full of it.
Not always. Not everywhere. But often enough — and confidently enough — that it’s becoming a real problem.
We are living in an age where artificial intelligence systems are spitting out facts, figures, timelines, and explanations by the ton. They’re fast, fluent, and friendly. But there’s one thing they’re not:
Accurate.
And nobody seems in a rush to fix that.
When the Machine Hallucinates
The tech world calls it “hallucination” when an AI invents something that sounds real but isn’t. A made-up source. A wrong date. A quote that never existed. They say it like it’s cute — like a robot had a funny dream.
It’s not cute. It’s misinformation wearing a lab coat.
Ask an AI to solve a math problem? It might give you the right answer — or it might make up a new formula on the fly.
Ask it for a historical quote? It might nail it — or stick Frederick Douglass in the same room as JFK and call it a teachable moment.
Ask it to summarize a news story? You could end up with a version of events that never happened, but feels true enough to go viral.
What’s Missing? Editors.
Back when I worked in a newsroom, we had a wall called “The Kill Board.” That’s where the stuff that didn’t check out went to die.
Wrong year? Killed. Wrong quote? Killed. Story doesn’t hold up? Rewrite it or it doesn’t run.
Now? That wall’s gone. There is no AI kill board. These machines write fast, write confidently, and write with the tone of authority — even when they’re completely wrong.
And the worst part?
Nobody’s editing the machine.
The Inaccuracy Feedback Loop
Once a wrong answer gets published — a fake caption, a false date, a fake scientific claim — it starts spreading.
Other AIs scrape it. Other sites publish it. Google starts indexing it. Pretty soon, that falsehood becomes the new “consensus.”
We’re not just making mistakes — we’re hard-coding them into the public record.
And this is happening everywhere: in classrooms, in articles, in YouTube scripts, in medical summaries, in your kid’s homework help site.
So What Do We Do?
- Slow Down. Speed is the enemy of truth. Just because AI can write 1,000 words in 30 seconds doesn’t mean it should.
- Bring Back the Red Pens. Every newsroom, blog, school, and agency using AI needs a human editor in the loop before anything goes live. Not after — before.
- Teach People to Question Fluency. Just because something sounds right doesn’t mean it is right. We need to build a public that knows how to slow down, double-check, and demand sources.
- Hold Platforms Accountable. Facebook, YouTube, Google — they helped build this monster. They can help tame it. Flag known AI content. Downrank inaccurate posts. Invest in real-time correction, not after-the-fact apologies.
- Force Transparency. AI-generated content should be labeled clearly:
“This content was generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.”
That’s not paranoia. That’s just a heads-up.
Don’t Let the Machines Edit Themselves
Even Eric Schmidt — the guy who helped build Google into the information firehose it is — says we’re reaching a point where machines could outpace our understanding. His warning? If AI systems start making decisions or sharing information that humans can’t explain or verify, “you’re going to have to turn them off.” But he also says, there is no plug to turn them off.
That’s not science fiction. That’s the guy who chaired the National Security Commission on AI, waving a red flag.
Schmidt’s blunt: Humans must stay in control. Not just for the big stuff like drones and bioengineering — but for the daily stuff too. Like writing history. Teaching math. Sorting truth from garbage.
AI can assist. It can even suggest. But it cannot be the final word. That job still belongs to us — the editors, the educators, the readers, the question-askers.
Because once you let a machine correct itself — or worse, ignore its own errors — the truth becomes just another output. And facts don’t survive that kind of automation.
The Cost of Lazy Truth
We’re entering an era where the truth can’t compete with a confident lie — because the lie has better SEO, a smoother tone, and a faster delivery pipeline.
But that lie still rots the foundation. It confuses the public. It distorts the record. It erases the work of real teachers, historians, scientists, and reporters.
And once that trust is gone, it’s a hell of a thing to get back.
So here’s your reminder, from someone who used to bleed red ink for a living:
Facts matter. Sources matter. Editors matter.
And if the future of information is going to be written by machines, then it damn well better be checked by humans.