About 50 residents of a community outside Chile’s capital spent Saturday trying their best to power an entirely human-operated chatbot that could answer questions and make silly pictures on command, in a message to highlight the environmental toll of artificial intelligence data centers in the region.

An experienced developer who can talk well, that is, imagine, articulate, define problem statements, architect and engineer, has a massive advantage over someone who cannot, more disproportionately than ever. Knowledge of specific language, syntax, and frameworks—code—is no longer a bottleneck. The physiological constraints of yore are no longer impediments. The machinery for instantly creating code at scale is now a commodity and available to everyone, just a pip install equivalent away. It requires no special training, no new language or framework to learn, and has practically no entry barriers—just good old critical thinking and foundational human skills, and competence to run the machinery. [...] For the first time ever, good talk is exponentially more valuable than good code. The ramifications of this are significant and disruptive. This time, it is different.

Based on the discourse around AI hallucinations, we were expecting these articles to contain citations to sources that didn’t exist, but this wasn’t true: only 7% of the articles had fake sources. The rest had information cited to real, relevant sources.

Far more insidious, however, was something else we discovered: More than two-thirds of these articles failed verification. That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.