The Trail Ledger’s AI is Hallucinating

I previously linked to Sam King’s blog ‘The Trail Ledger’ and now we’re back with another juicy “article” ‘The Toll Road to the Start Line‘. In it Sam “writes” the following paragraph:

Amer Sports, which owns Salomon as well as the UTMB brand, built a global racing circuit whose qualifying structure systematically directs runners toward races that pay licensing fees back to Amer Sports. The runner chasing UTMB entry is, in aggregate, a customer of an Amer Sports product ecosystem. Their training shoe purchases, their gear, and now their qualifying race entry fees all flow, at various removes, through the same corporate architecture.

Of course this is all complete horseshit and if you take a step back and look at the full article you quickly the entire thing is just AI slop – and that’s the kindest way of describing it.

In the comments Brian Metzler tries to correct Sam to which he gives just single word reply:

Fascinating!

His one word replies can mean two things: Either Sam’s genuinely fascinated to learn this fact – because he didn’t do any research himself for the article, or it’s the classic, dismissive “fascinating” as in “I don’t give a fuck about facts”. Which one you think is it?

The article has several other offensive “inaccuracies” like calling Olympic Valley Squaw Valley, but it’s not worth digging in further.

But my favorite part of the thing is the disclosures at the bottom of the article:

A Note on Data:
…
Amer Sports’ ownership of the UTMB brand and Salomon is documented through public corporate disclosures

The confidence at which these AI tools lie and at which the publishers share their findings lies is just breathtaking.

I guess Brian and I can add ‘AI fact checker’ to your resumes now – sigh.