I wouldn't be so quick to attribute the embellished biographies to AI. That's certainly a possibility, but it's also just as possible that these are humans going off of verbal/oral histories that morphed in the ongoing game of Telephone. Plenty of humans get things mixed up, after all.<p>Still, it's worth being vigilant about this sort of thing, AI or no - and LLMs are certainly increasing in the quality and quantity of bullshit they can produce. People give Wikipedia a lot of flack for being "editable by everyone", but the emphasis on providing actual citations for claims is an important one - to the point that I'll readily trust an "amateur"/"hobbyist" work that cites its sources over a "professional" work that doesn't.
I'm not very anti-LLM/AI, but this is one of the scarier parts, to me at least.<p>Data that is obscure, not easily fact-checked, and (outside of a
handful of people) there's no motivation to fact check it.<p>Incorrect data will sit there, mostly viewed by other bots,
incorporated into the next model. The issue is just going to snowball.<p>Good luck to any future historians that want to look back at
this time period.
The Law of Unintended Consequences is unavoidable; as so often I read this post, and said, "Yes, that's just what would happen. Oh, dear."