- New York Post writer Steve Cuozzo blasts AI for “appalling ignorance” and factual errors.
- AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude made numerous false claims about Cuozzo’s life and work.
- Anthropic, valued at nearly $1 trillion, is prepping for an IPO, but its Claude AI failed Cuozzo.
Content about my demise has been greatly exaggerated.
A recent Chat GPT post summarizing one of my articles referred to me as the “late” writer Steve Cuozzo, before restoring me to life the next day.
If artificial intelligence is so smart, how come it’s so stupid? In fact, “AI” might better stand for “Appalling Ignorance.”
We’re told AI will soon control our governments, minds and bodies. The pope warned us to beware AI’s dehumanizing, “Tower of Babel” effect. Economists fear it could wipe out jobs and reduce urban downtowns to uninhabited Pompeii-like ruins.
But, those who attribute life- and humanity-altering power to AI ought to first query the bots about themselves to see whether the platforms mangle their identities and histories.
The apocalyptic prognosticators rarely consider whether AI is any good at one of its core missions: to collect, distill and synthesize information into a form that transcends what ordinary search engines can do.
Sure, ChatGPT can readily make an elephant dance with a monkey or create entirely made-up people like the “actress” on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Magazine. But it’s all thumbs when it comes to knowledge of real people.
Buzzy Claude is no better.
I never wrote a cookbook. I never lived in Greenwich Village. I have no children. But Claude — the marquee product of Anthropic PBC — said I had done all of those things when I asked it about myself.
Claude knows I’m a longtime writer on commercial real estate. Way to go! But when I asked whether I’ve written about Herald Towers on West 34th Street, it found “nothing specific.” It even suggested I search the New York Post website! Isn’t that what AI is for?
Earlier this week, California-based Anthropic, which is valued at nearly $1 trillion, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering. I won’t be investing.
Of five AI platforms I tested, Elon Musk’s Grok did the best job of summing up my life and career. It even accurately and fairly compared some of my restaurant reviews with former New York Times critic Pete Wells’ takes on the same places — an impressive display of knowledge, context and understanding.
But things went down the rabbit hole elsewhere. Although Chat GPT, owned by Open AI, does a fabulous job analyzing Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” it’s a lazy lunkhead when it comes to little old me.
Not only did it say I was dead, it also couldn’t tell if I was educated. When asked about my schooling, Chat GPT claimed, “Publicly available biographical information about Cuozzo does not show a detailed educational background such as colleges attended or degrees earned … there is little widely published information about his formal education.”
Ahem —my degree from Stony Brook University is easily found on Wikipedia and sites that crib from it.
Perplexity AI boasts it “provides accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question.” So, I tossed it a hanging curveball — did Cuozzo ever write a book?
“I don’t see any evidence that Steve Cuozzo has published a book or memoir,” came the reply.
Now, that’s perplexing! My 1996 “It’s Alive: How America’s Oldest Newspaper Cheated Death and Why It Matters,” pops up hundreds of times in any cursory web search and on Amazon.com.
Meanwhile, Gemini AI claimed I “co-authored” a 1990 book — “Power Partners: How Two-Career Couples Can Play to Win” — in which I had no hand at all,
Gemini, like most AI engines, lifts from Wikipedia the way high school students of my day ripped off encyclopedias in their term papers, which is to say not very well.
“Power Partners” was written by my wife Jane Hershey Cuozzo and S. Diane Graham, as Wikipedia correctly says.
Claude gave me the biggest belly-laugh when it claimed, “Cuozzo authored a book called ‘The Finger Food Cookbook’ published in 1997.”
I wrote no such book. A few similar titles exist by different authors.
Once a howler pops up in AI land, there’s no stamping it out. The finger-foods fiction made its way into Perplexity, which said, “another source mentions” my authorship of the nonexistent work.
Maybe, AI will one day surpass human intelligence as Musk predicted. Or maybe, as detractors fear, cause so many job losses, it will reduce city downtowns to empty, Pompeii-like ruins.
But, until then, it needs to get its act together — and learn how to steal from Wikipedia.
