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The Who Cares Era

lier this week, it was discovered that the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer had both published an externally-produced "special supplement" that contained facts, experts, and book titles entirely made up by an AI chatbot. There's been a lot written about this (former Chicago Reader editor Martha Bayne's is the best), and I don't need to rehash it all.

In Hanif's case, he was writing about Time Machine, his incredible 90 minute deep dive into The Fugees' seminal album The Score. That they believe they can replace government workers—people who care an extraordinary amount about their arcane corner of the bureaucracy—with hastily-written AI code is another defining characteristic of right now. For whatever their reasons, a bunch of people had used a chatbot to help write their answers to questions that asked them to draw from their own, unique, personal experience.

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