We Asked the ‘Future of Truth’ Author to Explain How He Used AI. It Didn’t Go Well

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Earlier this month, WIRED published an excerpt from Steve Rosenbaum’s buzzy new book, The Future of Truth, which looks at how artificial intelligence warps people’s sense of reality. Shortly thereafter, The New York Times reported that the book contained over a half-dozen made-up or misattributed quotes. In a statement, Rosenbaum, who has a master's degree in "truth" from New York University, admitted that he had accidentally included “a handful” of “improperly attributed or synthetic” quotes. In an ironic twist, the veracity of a book about how AI impacts truth was now under intense scrutiny because of how its author had used AI.

After the Times story broke, WIRED took another look at our 1,450-word excerpt. The fact-checking team had reviewed it prior to publication, and we reconfirmed that its quotes and facts were accurate. But WIRED’s generative AI editorial policy prohibits the publication of AI-generated and AI-edited writing, and a reader email calling out the excerpt as being “blatantly AI-written” raised further questions about the extent to which Rosenbaum had used AI tools. In The Future of Truth’s acknowledgement section, Rosenbaum writes that ChatGPT, Claude, NaturalReaders, ProWritingAid, and Grammarly had helped “refine and polish the presentation of [his] ideas.” What, exactly, did that mean?

WIRED ran the excerpt through several AI-detection services, including Pangram, GPTZero, and ZeroGPT. Each service suggested that it was either likely AI-generated, or AI-generated with high confidence. But AI-detection tools are fallible, and can return inaccurate readings. So WIRED’s head of research emailed Rosenbaum directly to ask if and how he had used AI to write the excerpt.

He wrote back: “Like many writers working today, I used AI tools during parts of the research and editorial development process for the book, including source discovery, brainstorming, structural feedback, and language refinement.” But, he stressed, “the ideas, reporting, arguments, and final authorship are mine, and the WIRED excerpt was not generated by AI and then simply published as-is.” He urged WIRED’s editors to exercise caution trusting AI detection tools, noting that false positives can occur.

At this point, WIRED’s senior editors asked me to look into the episode, because I’ve covered AI slop in its various forms since 2024. My first step was to run the entire text of the book through Pangram’s detection tool. (While all AI-detection tools have limitations, and can show false-positives, Pangram is the current gold standard.) It came back that the book appeared to be 53 percent AI-generated, with an additional 9 percent registering as likely AI-assisted.

I called Rosenbaum and asked for a more detailed description of how he’d used AI to write the book, and whether he disputed Pangram’s results. (BenBella Books, whose imprint published The Future of Truth, did not return requests for comment. Simon & Schuster, which distributes BenBella’s books in the United States, declined to comment.)

Rosenbaum would not weigh in on the accuracy of Pangram’s results. In fact, he didn’t want to talk about them at all. “I don’t participate in that conversation,” he said. “It’s like saying, do you beat your wife? It’s one of those accusations that there’s no response to.”

He offered, instead, to broadly explain his editorial process. He says that at the beginning of the writing process, he used AI tools as search engines, helping him surface information for the more research-heavy sections of the book. To demonstrate how he might do this, he asked ChatGPT to describe me, then read the results out loud. The AI search more or less accurately described some of my prior stories, including work on AI-generated “zombie media sites.”

When I asked him to answer directly whether he had used AI to write or edit any of the passages in the book, he gave a winding answer. “No, that’s not how you write. The answer is, you take material—so, for example, the Kate response I just got, if I were to be writing about you, what would I do? Would I take it and paste it into Google Docs and then write around it and edit it up a little bit? Would I use the words ‘zombie media sites’ in quotes? Maybe. But I wouldn’t say, oh great, that’s answered my writing question for Kate, I’m going to stick that in my document and send it to my publisher.”

“But would you copy and paste it, and then edit it?” I asked.

“Probably,” he replied.

“Did you do that in this book?”

“I don’t remember. You’re looking for a smoking gun, and there isn’t one.”

Rosenbaum said that writers who “wake up in the morning wanting to have ideas” are now “living in fear, and it’s not healthy for democracy.” Before I could ask what exactly that meant, he went on: “I talked to another author this morning who's literally got a book coming out going to the publisher in a month, and she's fucking terrified.”

I asked if that was because she used AI in the process of writing the book.

“Of course. You say this with an accusatory tone, like she used a cheating tool.” He mentioned a report that places AI adoption among journalists at 82 percent. He said that WIRED’s generative AI policy is restrictive and hypothesized that our writers likely use AI in secret.

He doubled down on his personal commitment to AI, noting that he still uses it every day. “If the only way for me to not end up with a mistake ever again is to literally stop using AI, that's just not realistic. If the answer is to stop writing, that's not out of the realm of possibility.”

I asked him whether he would rather stop writing than stop using AI in his writing process. “Yeah,” he answered.

Rosenbaum vacillated between acknowledging that AI use could cause problems (“I do not understand why it's my job as an author to play whack-a-mole with a multibillion-dollar company who puts hallucinations into their feed as a business practice”) and repeatedly insisting that AI is indispensable, calling it the best writing partner he has ever had.

He had simultaneously proved the thesis of his book—AI was, clearly, causing rifts over what is authentic and what is not—while undermining its credibility.

When I told Rosenbaum that the way he used AI made me doubt the book’s accuracy and overall quality, he again brought up the study about journalists’ embrace of AI. “If 82 percent of journalists are using AI every day, then what you’re saying is you now have anxiety about the accuracy and reliability of essentially everything that is in the current media ecosystem,” he said.

Well, yeah. I’ve been covering the rise of AI slop on the internet for years. It’s pervasive. Skepticism is rational. But the study Rosenbaum cited, from the public relations software firm MuckRack, counts AI transcription and looking stuff up with ChatGPT as AI usage, which is substantively different from secretly incorporating AI-generated sentences into a draft.

When I asked MuckRack for a more detailed breakdown of how it found that journalists used AI, the company noted that only a quarter of the writers it polled had used artificial-intelligence tools for writing assistance. The majority of writers are not there. At least not yet.

Lines are constantly being drawn, scribbled out, and redrawn over appropriate AI use. I use an AI tool for transcription; I’ve also used Claude to create Freedom of Information Act requests. Some writers who oppose AI would say those use cases are wrong. Rosenbaum is a serial media entrepreneur. He was prescient on how important digital video and user-generated content would be on the internet. It’s possible his way of operating could one day be the norm.

Opinions around artificial intelligence in the media are already tilting toward increased acceptance. Earlier this year, WIRED spoke with tech reporters who openly embrace AI to write and edit stories. Independent journalist Alex Heath gives his reporting notes and other documents to an AI agent, which spins up his first draft. Some outlets are all in: Fortune, for example, is actively encouraging one of its reporters to cowrite stories with chatbots, and Business Insider permits its writers to use tools like ChatGPT on story drafts. A decade from now, newsrooms insisting that human writers do all the writing may look as quaint as getting a magazine delivered in print.

For now, there’s still some resistance. This year, the publishing house Hachette canceled plans to release a novel in the United States after Pangram indicated that it was largely AI-generated, even after the author denied that they had used AI in their writing. The New York Times severed ties with a freelancer for using AI. And recently, a firestorm of criticism ensued after a literary magazine published short stories that critics believe appeared to be AI-generated.

WIRED, too, had already been deep in the process of revising its editorial guidelines around AI. One aspect that will remain the same is that published work cannot be written with AI. Given the uncertainty around Rosenbaum's process, the excerpt was retracted as of Friday afternoon.