In The New York Times' 14 April 2026 analysis of Canada's election, Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was quoted denouncing politicians who changed allegiances as "turncoats". The remark was set as a direct quotation attributed to him, and readers had no way to tell it had never been spoken: the paper later confirmed the words were in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation.
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Expert: New York Times editors, Editors' note, The New York Times The failure here is not a hallucinated fact. It is a hallucinated speech act, and that is the harder kind to catch. An A.I. tool produced a summary of Pierre Poilievre's views about Canadian politics. Between that summary and the printed page, the summary was rendered as a direct quotation - a remark inside quotation marks, attributed to a named politician, formatting-wise indistinguishable from anything he actually said. The Times' own editors' note states the standard that was not met: "The reporter should have checked the accuracy of what the A.I. tool returned." The article was updated to quote from a speech Poilievre delivered in April, and the note records that he did not refer to politicians who changed allegiances as "turncoats" in that speech. The editors' note and correction ran in print on 2 May 2026, more than two weeks after the article appeared. Quotation marks are a format, and fluent formatting is precisely what a language model produces. A model asked to summarise a politician's position will readily deliver that summary in the register of a spoken remark, because that is the shape of the text it learned from. Nothing in a summary reads as unverified, which is why the rendering step - not the summary step - is where the check belongs. This case is a statement about process: unverified model output was allowed to become an attributed quotation, and no one compared it against the record until after publication. Source: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/10/new-york-times-editors-note/ (quoting the New York Times Editors' Note; the note and correction were also published in print: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/pageoneplus/editors-note-may-2-2026.html)
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