AI Verification Assumes You'll Read It First. Five Failures Prove You Won't.
Five incidents this year share one cause: the human read-through verification depends on never happened before the output reached its consequence.
5 min read10 posts across Judging AI
Five incidents this year share one cause: the human read-through verification depends on never happened before the output reached its consequence.
5 min readA hallucinated intelligence report nearly triggered an armed U.S. interception of a Chinese ship this week. The habit that would have caught it before it reached a decision-maker works just as well on a sales forecast or a board memo.
4 min readFabricated citations, a second AI fact-checker, merged code, and OpenAI's own safety warning all failed the same test this year: does this look right. Here's the specific check that replaces it for each type of output.
5 min readA law firm, a newspaper, a police officer, and an automaker all ran the same AI hallucination story this year in different industries. Here's the pattern connecting them and the one habit that decides which version of that story you avoid.
4 min readUnit 42 tested 685,339 prompts and found 2.1 million AI-generated URLs — 13,229 already live and malicious. In one case, researchers predicted which domain an AI would hallucinate. Twenty-three days later, an attacker registered it and deployed a phishing kit.
4 min readA Derbyshire officer was removed from duty and placed under criminal investigation for allegedly using AI to fabricate evidential material — the UK's first criminal case of its kind. The failure mode that caused it appears in professional documents every week.
5 min readFluency and accuracy are unrelated in AI output, and human error-detection is tuned almost entirely to fluency. Here are the tells that survive that mismatch, and the ones that don't.
5 min readFigures are the highest-risk thing AI produces and the thing people check least, because a number looks like a fact. Four checks that take under a minute each, and the one that catches the most.
5 min readTwo South African officials were suspended after 102 of 148 citations in a Cabinet-approved report were AI-fabricated. Nature retracted a 504-citation paper on the same day. The accountability gap between 'AI wrote it' and 'I submitted it' is closing. Here's what you do about it.
4 min readA law firm sent 42 fabricated citations to a judge. A newspaper published a quote that was never said. In every case the output looked right, because looking right is what these systems are reliably good at.
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