Business Insider Did Something So Stupid With AI That We're Reeling
As Semafor reports, a manager recommended fake, seemingly-AI-generated books to underlings last year on a reading list meant to help them better understand business journalism.
In the staff email, which was leaked to Semafor, the senior BI manager suggested well-known titles like Andrew Ross Sorkin's classic "Too Big To Fail," about the Wall Street crash of 2008, and "DisneyWar" by James Stewart, which exposed the tumultuous behind-the-scenes drama at the famed studio some 20 years ago.
Those were recommended alongside books that nobody had heard of, with names like "Simply Target: A CEO's Lessons in a Turbulent Time and Transforming an Iconic Brand" by Gregg Steinhafel, the former chief executive of the big-box chain, and "The House of Morgan: An Intimate Portrait of the Most Powerful Banking Family in the World," by purported author Fredric Morgan.
But Semafor was unable to find any evidence that those titles had ever been published. Some were similar to real books — like the legitimate book "The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance" by Ron Chernow — while others seem to have been completely made up.
One of the books on the most ludicrous falsehoods on the list was "Mark Zuckerberg Autobiography: The Man Behind the Code," a purported autobiography of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that also claims to have been written by a "Jasper Robin." (An autobiography, obviously, is written by its subject.)
Though Zuckerberg has been the subject of at least a few biographies written by other people, none of them have been named "Jasper Robin," and in fact, we were not able to find anything about said author except for their author page on Goodreads, which also links to the title in Italian and German — but not to any booksellers.
Though BI didn't admit the source for those phony titles either in leaked documents or in requests for comment from Semafor, it doesn't take a deep investigation to figure out where they almost certainly came from — especially given that the company is now investing in AI, and is planning to lay off 21 percent of its workforce amid its pivot to using the hallucination-happy technology.
In a memo to staff announcing the layoffs that later published on its website, BI CEO Barbara Peng said that the company is "going all-in on AI" and experiencing growing pains as it does.
"Change like this isn't easy," Peng wrote. "But Business Insider was born in a time of disruption — when the smartphone was reshaping how people consumed news. We thrived by taking risks and building something new."
To say that BI has "thrived" may be an overstatement. The site has long been winnowing its workforce; along with the latest cuts, the company laid off eight percent of its workforce last year and axed 10 percent of its roles in 2023 — and in that instance, AI experiments were also announced around the same time.
And when senior managers are recommending books they haven't even read, nevermind verified they're real, it's easy to see why.
More on hallucinatory citations: RFK Jr's "Make America Healthy Again" Report Cites Studies That Don't Exist, in Clear Sign of AI Generated Slop
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Ad industry insiders previously told BI this reflected advertisers' realization that half of the country voted for Trump, but that it could also be a signal of advertisers hedging against political risk. The notion that the crackdown on brand safety will provide a long-term bump to news publishers is untested and, for many industry insiders, feels unlikely. An executive from the media buying giant GroupM testified in a House Judiciary Committee hearing last year that just 1.28% of its clients' global ad budgets went toward news outlets. Meanwhile, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon — with their superior scale and adtech — are set to take in more than half of global ad spending outside China this year, according to the latest forecast from the World Advertising Research Center. Omnicom has agreed to be audited to demonstrate its compliance with the FTC's proposed consent decree, which also includes an agreement not to create block lists, unless requested to do so by clients. The FTC's provisional agreement says Omnicom-IPG can't collude with other firms to steer client ad spend based on political ideologies, which might cause some advertisers to simply opt to avoid news altogether. As BI previously reported, some ad industry insiders and analysts think the government's crackdown on brand safety is an overreach that will hurt publishers of all kinds while further consolidating power with the tech giants. New tools could help brands avoid the censorship label, but there's no room for GARM 2.0 Some in the ad industry tell BI they're hopeful that brand safety could enter an apolitical era, powered by tech rather than individual decisions over blunt filters. "My view is that AI will bring greater nuance to brand safety — making it more effective for buyers and less restrictive for sellers," said David Kohl, cofounder of the performance marketing firm Symitri. Kohl said startups like Mobian are building models that assess context, user sentiment, and real-time ad performance to identify which media environments deliver and which don't. Elsewhere, Stagwell is creating what Penn describes as a politically neutral news marketplace, in partnership with the adtech company The Trade Desk, enabling advertisers to buy multiple news sites at once, according to demographics. While brand safety might become more tech-enabled, it seems unlikely there will be a GARM 2.0 for some time yet. "It would be far too easy to become a target," said Lisa Macpherson, a former marketing executive who now serves as the policy director of Public Knowledge, a tech policy consumer advocacy group. Just ask the advertising agency group Dentsu. Late last year, Dentsu quickly exited its involvement with the creation of a new coalition that had intended to encourage ad investments in "credible" news. Days after the press release about the coalition was published, the House Judiciary Committee requested documents from the ad firm, having noticed similarities to GARM. In response, Dentsu said it had decided "not to pursue the initiative" nor "pursue any other effort with similar aims." Macpherson said advertisers would continue to do what's necessary to protect their investments in their brands. Yet, as the threat of lawsuits and document demands related to GARM rumbles on, people in the ad industry will likely avoid using the phrase "brand safety" in emails or marketing materials. "They may describe it differently," Macpherson said. "They will be very careful to couch it in language that evokes their constitutional right" to send ad dollars or not spend money on certain media outlets based on the suitability for their individual brands, she added. Zaneis of TAG said the recent government and legal scrutiny of brand safety practices might have been the jolt the industry needed, forcing marketers to pay closer attention to an issue that had gotten out of hand. "We may not like how we got here as an industry, but it's where we should have been all along," Zaneis said.
