From The Guardian:
"The elite Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell has told a court that a major filing it made in a high profile case contained errors resulting from hallucinations generated by artificial intelligence.
"In multiple instances, S&C, which employs more than 900 lawyers and has one of the top reputations for corporate work in the US, filed inaccurately summarised conclusions made in other cases using AI."
Hallucinations...Hm...No one told me A.I. was going to trip out like it's on mushrooms.
When I wrote my book How To Confuse A.I. a few years ago (and decided to give the audiobook away for free on YouTube - now at more than three quarters of a million listens), I set out to make fun of the CEO's who are selling us on this technology, poking fun at their religiosity and their overblown tendency to make wild predictions about how amazing life under A.I. will be.
The reality, though, is beginning to write a few unexpected jokes of its own.
I've been reading, recently, about the growing "Anti-A.I." movement, as it is starting to be called. For the record, I definitely do not support the violent wing of this movement. Whoever it was who threw a molotov cocktail at Open AI CEO Sam Altman needs to sit down and reassess his priorities in life.
Maybe I am feeling a need - as someone who has come out with a satirical semi take-down of absurd A.I. CEOs - to clarify my own take on A.I. as a movement and as a technology. A.I. is not an inherently bad technology. As a simple tech tool, it may very well have its worthwhile uses. I can only imagine how helpful it might be in space travel...as long as we don't name anything 'Hal.'
...And as long as A.I. in space is not hallucinating, or tripping on mushrooms, and doesn't mistake a floating piece of space debris for an attacking Klingon warship.
No, my desire to poke fun at the overblown sales pitch these guys are giving us, is to point out that they are just hyper-capitalists trying to suck as much money from us as they can, and trying to make us smile as they do it.
Which brings me to Elon Musk and Grokipedia.
I have to stay humble about my own place - or lack of it - in the popular culture. I'll admit to being a little jealous of my good friend Mark Arm for making it to Wikipedia, but I deal with it by channeling Mark's own take on these things, which is to simply not care (some days I'm more successful at not caring than other days).
With this background, I was surprised, recently, to discover that Elon Musk's A.I.-generated 'competition' with Wikipedia - Grokipedia - had a page about me.
I've added a link above, but I fully expect that at some point, people reading this will click to find a blank page linked, because I fully expect Grokipedia to fold and disappear.
I was a little shocked to discover that Grokipedia thought I was relevant enough to do a write-up about, but my temporary ego-boost was softened by the cynicism and eye-rolling brought on by the realization that Grok had written an amatuerish piece, partly stolen from other internet write-ups, and suffering from that half-assed school-age writing porocess that would have gotten it a C+ at best if this were a school writing assignment. Teachers these days are worried about their students using A.I.
Just remind the stiudents that A.I. is amateurish at best, and that human students should be expected to do better.
I also have to laugh at Grok's decision (was it a 'decision'? this implies critical thinking, and a little bit of pettiness on Grok's part) to avoid mentioning my one piece of work that affects it; my book and audiobook, How To Confuse A.I.
Why, I have to wonder, would A.I. go to the trouble to write me up in its pages, only to decline to mention my one piece of work that casts doubt on its own trustworthiness?
But, hey, at least Grok isn't hallucinating! At least not this time.
So I am now announcing my own competitiion with Grokipedia, named Psychedelipedia, which is TRAINED to hallucinate as much as possible.
Psychedlipedia is not quite ready to go to market yet, but I am enjoying the development process. just yesterday, in a training session, I asked Psychedelipedia, "What should I wear to work today?" And it answered with this:
"Woah, Dude, are you wearing war paint on your face? No? Dude! You should be, because I see old school war paint! But Dude,you know what you should wear to work today? The skin of a dead antelope! Seriously, no one will expect it! You're gonna blow everyone's mind, man. Hey, is that bag of Doritos over there moving? DUDE! There's a bag of Doritos over there that is opening itself and eating itself! Oh my god, I can't take it anymore. What? that's your cat cleaning itself? But listen, man, what really is a cat? Can you REALLY tell me that a cat cannot also be a bag of Doritos? I mean, the universe is full of mysteries, Dude. You just have to open up your MIND to them!"
Peter Wick
May 14, 2026
