Technology is equally to blame for the erosion of fact. The remarkable new A.I. agents look and act so much like omniscient oracles that it’s easy to forget that they are sophisticated text predictors, about as reliable as the corpora they were trained on, and it’s just as easy to mistake their output for expertise. Human experts are not always right, but it would take a severe brain injury to make one confidently hallucinate invented information as factual, as the current generation of artificial intelligence is prone to do.
A recent A.I.-generated summer reading list, printed in The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Chicago Sun-Times, recommended 10 wholly imaginary books (by real authors) before eventually throwing in a few you could find in a bookstore. The stakes may seem low when A.I. lies about a bibliography, but as users of Grok learned last month, it’s also alarmingly easy to manipulate chatbots into vouching for racist conspiracy theories like white genocide if that’s what programmers want.
Trivia, of all things, is a ray of hope in our moment of national crisis. Somehow, it’s still an arena where ideological projects are completely ignored and the thing that matters — the only thing that matters — is the right answer. On “Jeopardy!” the clues are novel and varied and created every night by gifted human writers, never spun or fact-checked by A.I. The canon from which the questions are drawn is unapologetically evidence-based, the product of scholarly and scientific consensus. And yet the show is, I’m told, one of the last great media monoliths, regular viewing for millions of faithful viewers in red and blue states alike.
How do we understand the seeming anachronism of “Jeopardy!”? In a dark time, my secret optimism is that our viewers’ love for quiz games is a sign of what can eventually save us: a practical belief in fact and error that is more fundamentally American than the toxic blend of proud ignorance and smarter-than-thou skepticism that’s brought us to this point.
It stands to reason, then, that making government run more like a quiz show can only be a step in the right direction. In May at a congressional hearing, Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire asked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to define habeas corpus, a bedrock common-law protection under fire from the administration.
Ms. Noem wasn’t even close. “Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” she answered.
“That’s incorrect,” noted Ms. Hassan, sounding as much like a quizmaster as a senator.
Later that week on “Jeopardy!” a category, “definitions of legal terms,” happened to pop up in the first round. The game was taped months in advance, so it was by sheer coincidence that one of the five clues concerned the definition of, yes, habeas corpus.
The “Jeopardy!” contestant, you’ll be relieved to hear, responded correctly.