Let me disclose the embarrassment upfront: this, too, has been run through a proprietary AI pipeline after the “author” lobbed in a bundle of rough notes instead of doing the decent thing and writing the column himself. Yes, the same author who likes to grumble about AI use apparently outsourced his grumbling to a machine because he was, in technical terms, feeling slothful and intellectually underfunded. You can probably tell. No matter how hard he tried, he could not stop the system from producing the faint aroma of AI varnish: the smooth transitions, the suspiciously tidy cadence, the lingering sense that a committee of very articulate office printers has joined the conversation.
That confession aside, the complaint is real. One of the dreariest habits of the current internet is the rise of the AI screenshot as argument: a glowing chat bubble offered as though it were an affidavit, or the phrase “I asked AI and it says…” delivered with the solemnity once reserved for a footnote. This is a category error. A chatbot response may be useful. It may even be correct. Most of the time, on ordinary matters, it will land somewhere near common sense. That is precisely what makes it dangerous as evidence. Plausibility is not provenance.
The distinction matters. Knowledge in public argument requires accountability. If a newspaper publishes a claim, there is an editor to blame. If a scholar makes one, there is a bibliography to inspect. If Wikipedia states something, one can trace the references, inspect the edit history and quarrel with the sourcing. The site spent years clawing its way from punchline to a surprisingly robust clearing house of referenced material because it built mechanisms for verification. It learned, through bruising experience, that anonymity alone does not doom a source, provided transparency and citation do the heavy lifting.
A chatbot gives you almost none of that. The answer arrives as a polished paragraph detached from a visible chain of custody. Even systems that now append links do not always solve the problem; studies have found that generative search and chat tools can misattribute, fabricate or overstate sources, while researchers continue to build specialised citation and retrieval methods precisely because ordinary language models remain unreliable at attribution. In some evaluations, users nevertheless rate such systems as convenient and trustworthy, which helps explain the confidence with which AI-generated claims are now smuggled into everyday disputes. The machine sounds composed, and people confuse composure with authority.
That is why the AI screenshot feels so objectionable. It resembles evidence while sidestepping the obligations evidence normally carries. It asks the reader to trust a black box whose workings are inaccessible, whose output is probabilistic, and whose mistakes are delivered in the same silky register as its truths. To cite a chatbot in place of a source is to say, in effect, that the forest spirits have whispered a fact into your ear and would rather not be cross-examined.
None of this requires Luddism. AI is marvellous for many things: drafting, brainstorming, summarising, organising, translating, provoking, nudging. Even this piece began life as a lazy message-to-friend draft handed over to the silicon ghostwriter because the human involved could not be bothered to locate his own verbs. There is no point pretending otherwise. The sensible objection is narrower and sharper. Use AI as a tool for finding the trailhead, not as permission to skip the trail. If a chatbot gives you a statistic, find the report. If it offers a legal claim, locate the statute or judgment. If it states a historical fact, identify the book, archive or article from which the claim can be checked.
Public discourse is already saturated with frictionless assertion. It does not need a new ritual in which unsupported claims are laundered through a synthetic voice and presented as neutral wisdom. The standard should be simple: if you want to persuade people, show your workings. Bring receipts with names on them. Accountability is what separates information from incantation.
Sources: Nature; JMIR Cancer; arXiv; New Media & Society; Social Media + Society; OECD.AI.