Business Insider Did Something So Stupid With AI That We’re Reeling

Amid Business Insider's latest pivot to AI, the site's past brushes with the technology are coming back to haunt it.

As Semafor reports, a manager recommended fake, seemingly-AI-generated books to underlings last year on a reading list meant to help them better understand business journalism.

In the staff email, which was leaked to Semafor, the senior BI manager suggested well-known titles like Andrew Ross Sorkin's classic "Too Big To Fail," about the Wall Street crash of 2008, and "DisneyWar" by James Stewart, which exposed the tumultuous behind-the-scenes drama at the famed studio some 20 years ago.

Those were recommended alongside books that nobody had heard of, with names like "Simply Target: A CEO’s Lessons in a Turbulent Time and Transforming an Iconic Brand" by Gregg Steinhafel, the former chief executive of the big-box chain, and "The House of Morgan: An Intimate Portrait of the Most Powerful Banking Family in the World," by purported author Fredric Morgan.

But Semafor was unable to find any evidence that those titles had ever been published. Some were similar to real books — like the legitimate book "The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance" by Ron Chernow — while others seem to have been completely made up.

One of the books on the most ludicrous falsehoods on the list was "Mark Zuckerberg Autobiography: The Man Behind the Code," a purported autobiography of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that also claims to have been written by a "Jasper Robin." (An autobiography, obviously, is written by its subject.)

Though Zuckerberg has been the subject of at least a few biographies written by other people, none of them have been named "Jasper Robin," and in fact, we were not able to find anything about said author except for their author page on Goodreads, which also links to the title in Italian and German — but not to any booksellers.

Though BI didn't admit the source for those phony titles either in leaked documents or in requests for comment from Semafor, it doesn't take a deep investigation to figure out where they almost certainly came from — especially given that the company is now investing in AI, and is planning to lay off 21 percent of its workforce amid its pivot to using the hallucination-happy technology.

In a memo to staff announcing the layoffs that later published on its website, BI CEO Barbara Peng said that the company is "going all-in on AI" and experiencing growing pains as it does.

"Change like this isn't easy," Peng wrote. "But Business Insider was born in a time of disruption — when the smartphone was reshaping how people consumed news. We thrived by taking risks and building something new."

To say that BI has "thrived" may be an overstatement. The site has long been winnowing its workforce; along with the latest cuts, the company laid off eight percent of its workforce last year and axed 10 percent of its roles in 2023 — and in that instance, AI experiments were also announced around the same time.

And when senior managers are recommending books they haven't even read, nevermind verified they're real, it's easy to see why.

More on hallucinatory citations: RFK Jr's "Make America Healthy Again" Report Cites Studies That Don't Exist, in Clear Sign of AI Generated Slop

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