Tom Zeller Jr. , The Washington Post; Don’t quit this whole-brain workout
"Last month, journalists discovered that “The Future of Truth,” a book about AI’s effect on knowledge, contained manufactured quotes and other inaccuracies that the author had apparently copied and pasted from a large language model. At around the same time, it appeared as if one of the prizewinning stories published in Granta, a prestigious British magazine, was written by a bot. This spring, Hachette announced it was canceling Mia Ballard’s novel “Shy Girl” in the U.S. over similar allegations.
All this — uncertain authorship, neutered prose, the disintegration of trust about who’s written what — has profound consequences. But the scandals raise a more unsettling question: What happens when we begin to outsource one of the brain’s most cognitively integrative activities?"
