May 20, 2026
This is the ultimate nightmare scenario. You spend decades building a credible career as a professional journalist, author, and speaker. And then AI comes along with its pernicious hallucinations and banal pablum outputs. You watch as harried college students and would-be corporate intellectuals alike are entranced by AI’s facile yet deceptively complex pantomimes of human cognition. You decide to pull the mask off of this sham and craft a book designed to warn the public about the perils and pitfalls of accepting AI outputs as the truth.
But somewhere along the way, while imparting your decades of experience as a sage countervoice to those who might haphazardly embrace AI as a proxy for rigorous research and the muscle-building scutwork of actually writing, you let yourself fall victim to the very seductive AI dangers your book was meant to warn others about.
This is the cold sweat, snap awake at 3 a.m. moment. Trembling and thanking the universe that it was just a horrible phantasm lurking in the darker corners of your mind. Until you trudge over to your bathroom mirror, slap a palm full of cold water onto your face, and realize…this isn’t a nightmare at all. It really just happened.
That sobering internal reckoning could very well be playing out right now for Steven Rosenbaum, the author of The Future of Truth, a book currently sold on the Simon & Schuster website and described as exploring, “How truth is being bent, blurred, and synthesized, and how the ways we love, work, learn, and remember are changing—even history is no longer trusted. Why institutions we recently trusted—medicine, education, justice, journalism—are collapsing under pressure of fast-moving, profit-driven AI.”
The book has a foreword penned by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, and boasts praise-filled blurbs from popular authors including Kurt Andersen, Michael Wolff, and Ian Bremmer. The author was even allowed to present an excerpt of the book on Wired, where he wrote, “The danger is no longer just misinformation. Thanks to AI, it’s now possible to manufacture fake realities at scale.” By every conceivable metric, the book was primed to be a bestseller.
UPDATE, 5/29/2026: Wired has since retracted the excerpt with an Editor’s note.
However, the book’s position as a potential guiding light amid the chaos of AI-generated misinformation came crashing down this week when The New York Times exposed Rosenbaum as having published a book riddled with AI hallucinations and fake quotes.
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It’s no small thing to publicly accuse a well known writer of blatant hypocrisy. But unlike the author of the book in question, Benjamin Mullin, the reporter who broke the story, was thorough with his research. His investigation into the book, which was released on May 12, uncovered a range of made-up quotes by university professors, and even tech pundit and podcaster Kara Swisher. When confronted by Mullin, Rosenbaum dipped into his spin machine bag, calling the AI errors “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes.” Synthetic quotes? Hey, points for creativity, I guess.
“As I disclosed in the book’s acknowledgments, I used AI tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process,” Rosenbaum told Mullin. “That does not excuse these errors, of which I take full responsibility. I am now working with the editors to thoroughly review and quickly correct any affected passages; any future editions will be corrected.”
The fact that Rosenbaum used AI to help write his book isn’t something he’s been shy about. In fact, in an interview with Fintech TV, posted this week, the author made a point to assert that, while he uses AI to help with his writing, he insists upon maintaining a sense of human agency.
“One of the things I say to young people is, make sure you have a writer’s voice,” said Rosenbaum. “For example, I hate spell check, or grammar check, because there’s ways I like to write that I know are grammatically incorrect, but they’re me. And if you read them, you go, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s Steve,’ There’s a certain kind of edge I have. And so when they want to smooth it out, I’ll argue with ChatGPT, it’ll say, ‘Well, I just shortened that and made it tighter.’ Don’t make my writing tighter. Leave my writing alone.”
He says this to the interviewer with a passion that seems quite sincere.
“When I wrote the first draft of the book, and then I sent it to my publisher, and they came back with edits. We had really good frothy arguments,” he continued. “And they said, ‘You’re using an acronym,’ but at the end of the day, it was my voice that got to win that argument. It wasn’t the editor saying, ‘Look, I really want to write the book for you. That’s not our role.’ And I think AI often thinks it’s smarter than you. And that makes me angry. Don’t tell me how to write, thank you very much, Mr. Robot.”
Alas, it appears Mr. Robot won after all.
Amazingly, in his statement to Mullin, Rosenbaum said, “These AI errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises about truth, trust and AI and its impact on society, democracy and editorial.” Wrong. Absolutely wrong. Those AI errors do, in fact, diminish the book’s efficacy as any kind of check on what is and isn’t meaningful about the AI debate around truth. Fundamentally, the book is now an ironic case study that will add to the corpus of research for whoever eventually writes a proper book on the topic.
Incidentally, Rosenbaum’s book is not related to Grizzly Man film director Werner Herzog’s The Future of Truth book, which was released about eight months earlier, in 2025, and tackles some of the same territory.
But there’s more, and this is really the touchy part that Mullin politely steered around in his piece.
What this book does more effectively than anything else is throw away decades of hard-earned human credibility. I’m not saying Rosenbaum will never be paid to write or speak again. On the contrary, he seems so well connected that it’s likely he’ll get a one-time “it happens” pass from at least some of his media and business confrères. Still, at this point in human history, in the shadow of AI, your human credibility is all you have left to peddle your futurist, business prognosticator, and erudite thinker wares. Once the public gets the whiff that you’ve offloaded a significant portion of that intellectual work to a hallucinating $20-a-month chatbot, you have, in a sense, surrendered the game.
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To the question, “Is letting AI direct your book writing process essentially surrendering your thinking to a machine?” the answer from at least one consequential voice appears to be: Maybe not.
While investigating the underpinnings of the Rosenbaum story, another related topic slipped through the digital transom and commanded my attention. During an interview with the Today show, James Daunt, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, revealed that the debate over AI books may already be over in some important corners of the book publishing industry.
“I have actually no problem selling any book as long as it doesn’t masquerade or pretend to be something it isn’t,” saidDaunt. “As long as an AI-written book says it is an AI-written book, then we will stock them.”
With that statement, Barnes & Noble, the biggest book chain in the U.S. at around 600 stores, just soft validated every AI-generated book flooding Amazon, or lurking on someone’s laptop waiting to be submitted to a publisher. With this statement, Daunt has effectively sanctioned AI books being openly sold alongside human-written books. The notion that a distinction would be made by somehow labeling the book AI-generated seems largely irrelevant in this context. Holding Daunt’s words in mind, couldn’t someone like Rosenbaum, or Mia Ballard before him, simply add a tiny “AI-assisted” label somewhere on the back of the book, and cleanly (in the eyes of Barnes & Noble) move forward?
Years ago, I cheered—backed by my patronage of its stores—Barnes & Noble’s initial efforts against the Amazon book-selling behemoth. And sure, business is business. But I’m not so sure my writer’s sympathy for a once-beloved literary outpost was well-placed. Now that Barnes & Noble is giving the green light to AI-generated books to fight for shelf space in its stores against human-written books, we will be further compelled to consider what it means to be an author versus what it means to be a human author.
Writing well is hard enough. Getting published is even harder. Fighting to assert the importance of the human voice isn’t a battle most writers have the capacity to engage. Nevertheless, it now looks like they have no choice. ✍︎.
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Cover: Christian Slater and Rami Malek in ‘Mr. Robot’ USA Network
