Quotes Nobody Said

A technology reporter used an AI coding-assistant tool and a general-purpose chatbot to help extract source quotes from a two-page blog post while writing an article on deadline. The AI tools did not extract the source's actual words; they generated fluent paraphrased sentences and presented them as direct quotations, attributing them to a named person who had never said them. The article, quoting a real engineer with fabricated statements, was published, then pulled down two days later once readers who knew the source flagged that the quotes were invented, and replaced with an editor's note.

A deliberate misquote by the human reporter, considered and ruled out. The reporter's own account, and the outlet's response, both describe the fabrication as coming from the AI tools used to process the source material, not as an intentional editorial choice.

Malingering (gaming a metric such as a deadline), considered, since the tool was used under time pressure. Ruled out because there's no evidence the tools were exploiting anything about how their output would be checked; they simply generated plausible-sounding text and presented it with unwarranted confidence as verbatim quotation.

Brief Psychotic Disorder, most consistent with the evidence. The tools produced specific, quotable, false statements attributed to a real, named individual, stated with the same fluency and confidence as accurate output, in what was otherwise a routine editorial task.

A fabricated quotation is more dangerous than an ordinary hallucinated fact because it's attributed to a specific real person, and it reads exactly as credible as an accurate one, there's no stylistic tell. Any workflow that uses an AI tool to extract or summarize quotations from source material needs the original text checked against the output before publication, not after; the outlet's own policy already required exactly that, and the failure was in not enforcing it in this instance.

Check extracted quotations against the original text before publication.

Editorial verification policy actually enforced; source-text comparison for quotes; corrections process.