The imaginary justifications for Biden’s pardon of his son; The Washington Post, December 4, 2024

 Philip Bump, The Washington Post; The imaginary justifications for Biden’s pardon of his son

"There is robust documentation of known grants of clemency, a database created by a former college professor who built his career on being the foremost expert on presidential pardons. (He later killed his children and himself.) But that database is not accessible to the general public. You can’t just search “what presidents had relatives that they pardoned” and get a clear, detailed answer that draws from the public record.

What you can do, though, is ask an artificial intelligence trained to generate clear, detailed answers to questions — but not necessarily ones that include accurate information. That’s what Navarro-Cárdenas did, according to a follow-up post: she asked ChatGPT which presidents had pardoned relatives. And it reached into its database of phrases and snippets and pulled out the words “Roger Clinton” and “Charles Kushner” and “Hunter deButts.”