We Asked ‘The Future Of Reality’ Author To Explain How He Used AI. It didn’t go well
Earlier this month, WIRED published an excerpt from Steve Rosenbaum’s new book, The Future of Truthlooking at how artificial intelligence is changing people’s sense of reality. Soon after, the New York Times reported that the book contained more than a dozen quotations that were made up or not made up. In a statement, Rosenbaum, who has a master’s degree in “truth” from New York University, admitted that he had mistakenly included “a number” of quotes that were “inappropriately or artificially marked”. Ironically, the authenticity of a book about how AI affects reality came under intense scrutiny because of how its author used AI.
After the Times story broke, WIRED revisited our 1,450-word piece. A fact-checking team reviewed it before it was published, and we also verified that its quotes and facts were accurate. But WIRED’s AI-generated editorial policy prohibits the publication of AI and AI-generated text, and a reader email calling the episode “blatantly written about AI” raised further questions about the extent to which Rosenbaum used AI tools. In The Future of TruthIn Rosenbaum’s acknowledgments section, Rosenbaum writes that ChatGPT, Claude, NaturalReaders, ProWritingAid, and Grammarly helped “refine and polish the presentation [his] ideas.” What did that really mean?
WIRED ran this episode using AI visualization tools, including Pangram, GPTZero, and ZeroGPT. Each service suggested that it might be AI-powered, or AI-built with greater confidence. But AI detection tools are not infallible, and can return inaccurate readings. So WIRED’s head of research emailed Rosenbaum directly asking if he had used AI to write the quote.
He wrote and replied: “Like many writers working today, I used AI tools during parts of the research and editorial development process of a book, including source discovery, discussion, structural feedback, and language development.” But, he stressed, “the opinions, reporting, arguments, and final writing are my own, and the WIRED excerpt was not generated by an AI and was simply published as is.” He urged WIRED editors to be cautious and trust AI detection tools, noting that falsehoods are possible.
At this point, WIRED’s senior editors asked me to look at 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 the Pangram discovery tool. (Although 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, and an additional 9 percent registered as possibly AI-assisted.
I called Rosenbaum and asked him for a detailed explanation of how he used AI to write the book, and whether he disputes Pangram’s results. (BenBella Books, publ The Future of Truthdid not return requests for comment. Simon & Schuster, which distributes BenBella’s books in the United States, declined to comment.)
Rosenbaum could not measure the accuracy of the Pangram results. In fact, he didn’t want to talk about them at all. He said: “I’m not participating in that conversation. “It’s like, do you beat your wife? It is one of these unanswered allegations.”
He offered, instead, to elaborate on his planning process. He says that at the beginning of the writing process, he used AI tools such as search engines, which helped him uncover information about the book’s difficult parts of research. To show how he could do this, he asked ChatGPT to explain it to me, and then read the results out loud. AI searches accurately described some of my earlier stories, including work on AI-generated “zombie media sites”.
