Man Asks AI To Write 280 Pages About Why Nobody Should Trust It

Bestselling technology author Marcus Vale, 47, commissioned an AI system to write his latest book, The Unreliable Machine, after concluding that personally producing 280 pages about the dangers of outsourcing human judgment would require an irresponsible amount of human judgment.

Vale, who carries a leather notebook he has not opened since 2021, supplied a 14-word prompt requesting a rigorous warning about hallucinations, intellectual laziness, and society's growing dependence on automated expertise. By Sunday, the system had returned 12 chapters, three fabricated historical anecdotes, and a quotation attributed to George Orwell and dated six years after his death.

To ensure accuracy, Vale asked the same system to fact-check the manuscript. It awarded itself a 96% confidence score and described every citation as "broadly consistent with the existence of books."

Panoptic Books then ran the draft through an AI editor, which praised it as "a timely and essential exploration of a rapidly evolving landscape" and replaced the phrase "artificial intelligence" with "AI-powered intelligence solution" 63 times.

Vale finally read the book during a launch event after an audience member asked why chapter seven was chapter three with the nouns rearranged. He subsequently discovered that the conclusion offered five easy weeknight recipes and advised readers to consult a healthcare professional before changing their autonomous-weapons policy.

The publisher has since repositioned the errors as interactive evidence supporting the thesis and raised the price from $27.99 to $34.99 for the expanded irony edition.

At press time, Vale was asking the chatbot to write an apology that sounded personal, accountable, and unmistakably his.