Warning: Created by A Human With A Good BS Detecter

 June 24, 2025

   There's a big feature in Sunday's New York Times Magazine on writing history with the assistance of AI and it underscores many of our main concerns. My favorite line in the piece is an editor who became disturbed by how easy it was for AI to regurgitate bad information, saying, "that's what AI can't do. It has no bullshit detector."

   Speaking of BS, here is a new trend that really grinds me.

Josie and Wyatt at their Happy Days Mine. 

The dog's name is Earpie

   And, here is an AI concoction circulating online attempting to capture the same camp.

A totally fake AI image of Wyatt Earp in camp.

   There is a new book The Gunfighters, by Bryan Burrough that has Jesse James killing bank teller Joseph Heywood in the failed Northfield, Minnesota bank raid in September of 1876. This is a long disproved belief perpetrated by early biographers who wanted it to be Jesse. In fact there is a sworn affidavit of bank employee Frank Wilcox that identifies Frank James as Heywood's killer, and this after Wilcox made a special trip to the Independence jail to observe Frank in person. In addition, Cole Younger, on his death bed, admitted to Jesse Jr. that the rider of the dun horse was Frank James, and that it was Frank who killed the bank teller. Two things possibly happened: Burrough didn't dig deep enough (he sites T.J. Stiles' book, "Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War" in his bibliography and Stiles names Jesse as the killer). Or, the AI sided with Stiles, and, it's in this fulcrum of competing "facts" that AI is not quite reliable—yet.     

   Here is how a friend of mine who does his research put it to me: 

   "In my books, I've always made a point of including a detailed bibliography listing the primary source materials I consulted and making it clear that I traveled extensively to archives, historic sites, etc., as part of my research. I believe this is even more important now with the growing use of AI. I want my readers to know that I personally mined those materials, that I walked where my subjects walked. And while today's historians are blessed with the incredible resource of digitized historic newspapers, probably 99 percent of the primary source material out there remains unscanned and will likely stay that way far into the future -- it costs money to digitize archival materials, and most institutions simply don't have the money or staff to devote to it. So, AI might be able to compose a decent biography of Wyatt Earp, but it will have done it by combing through online materials only. It'll never see those grayscale copies at the Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park that contain John Flood's transcriptions of Wyatt's story of his life, the source Flood used to write his unpublishable Earp manuscript. Thank goodness for that. (By the way, very few authors even know of their existence.)

A page of the Flood Manuscript with Wyatt narrating his account of killing Frank Stilwell

   "It's my hope that any book written either with the assistance of AI or entirely by AI comes with a full disclosure to that effect. Same with music, film, art, any creative art form. Maybe like those 'Made in the USA' tags or stickers, we'll see 'Created by a Human.'"

—Mark Lee Gardner

   Or, perhaps this is where it's going.

"Created by a human with a good BS detector."

—Future book endorsements