How AI Missed the Point Entirely on a Viral Case
The Case That Wasn’t
A few weeks ago, there was a follow-up to a story I had written about for a client – a teenager was clocked at 132 mph on a Connecticut highway. The story went viral when the kid told the arresting state trooper that he was late for a job interview.
The kid’s case was thrown out of court. It turned out that none – as in NONE – of it was true. Not the speed, car, excuse.
What AI Said Happened
The follow-up story was in the Hartford Courant – a once great, venerated, newspaper that, aside from some regular columnist, is virtually unreadable. So, I asked Chat GPT Pro 4.5 to read the damn thing and see what it could squeeze out of it while I did some more searching.
The recap came back neat, orderly, the time lines had been cleaned up and everything put in proper order. Reassuring except for the fact it while it made sense it was also spectacularly wrong.
The AI’s Fictional Narrative
AI spun a story about an exasperated trooper dealing with a suspect (kid) who refused to cooperate wherein ‘cooperate’ was defined as ‘agree with the trooper’s accusations.’ It even managed to wave away the trooper’s threatening the kid’s mother with obstruction as a ‘reasonable attempt to get the truth’. . . truth here being the trooper’ claims.
The Reality
The problem: the trooper had the wrong car, the wrong driver, invented the ‘I’m late for work’ claim, and did no investigating whatsoever. AI, however, stripped out the contradictions and could not get off the official version. I didn’t ask it, but I’m sure it was picking up ‘ghosts’ from the original story and my previous piece for that client.
Unless closely supervised, by the way, AI has the habit of inserting old pieces of discarded info in what will be sure to be the worst possible place for your purposes.
Why This Matters
If the user had not been familiar with the case from the start and hadn’t read the Courant piece – in other words just dropped the article in for a synopsis – they would have embarrassed themselves in the subsequent piece. An utter fail.
It would have been up there with Kristi Noem’s complaint that Wednesday’s South Park got her face wrong, never mind the depictions of her shooting dogs, arresting Dora the Explorer, etc.
The Core Problem with AI “Reading” for You
That, though, is what AI can do when it “reads” for you. Why? Because AI has no way to know why you’re reading the piece. For advice? Hunting for bias? Tracking mistakes? Studying how a side frames a story? None of that matters to a system built to produce a neutral, general-audience recap.
When I asked it why it missed, well, everything, it answered: AI will always summarize as if the goal is neutral, general-audience recap — which means it erases the very slant or detail you might be looking for.
Takeaway
If you outsource the reading, you outsource your lens. That’s how you end up with every detail technically correct and the meaning completely wrong.
