Reporter doing story on Epstein & Silicon Valley CEOs was told by an SV comms rep that _Grok_ said he was lying [View all]

Bluesky thread from the NYT tech reporter who did the story, followed by some of the replies about idiots trusting AI.

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@rmac.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T17:38:53.472Z

The comms rep just had no ability to comprehend that AI takes in the information that already exists in the world and repackages it. Our reporting had yet to be published and therefore wasn't out in the world hadn't been ingested by any chatbot.

And they just... believed the chatbot.

— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@rmac.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T17:42:50.194Z

Multiply that by 50 million US voters as see where that gets us.

— Ralph (@ralphhhenson.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T17:45:17.985Z

Yiiikes…

I thought this would be an emerging issue in some pockets of the population like high schoolers or or people generally unused to doing any kind of research . I did not expect it to already be an issue for white color information-based professionals

— Phillip Vander Klay (@vanderklay.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T17:47:54.927Z

it's because Silicon Valley has done its best to frame these bots as search engines, instead of what they actually are, which is larger-scale versions of the shitty autoprediction tool in your phone that constantly predicts everything incorrectly.

— five pennies in a trenchcoat (@snickettes.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T19:26:38.212Z

I can't find the skeet now, but (if I recall correctly) a few months ago @tressiemcphd.bsky.social mentioned some guy was insisting she was married because that's what Google AI Overview was telling him and was even sending her screenshots as "proof" — as if she wouldn't know her own marital status.

— Rebecca Kennison (@rrkennison.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T19:39:03.948Z

Yes!

— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T19:44:18.050Z

AI makes people stupid. By design.

— Kelly Barnhill (@kellybarnhill.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T19:42:38.069Z