EP 23: ChatGPT is Lying to You: What Taylor Swift's Grammy "Win" Taught Me About AI Hallucinations
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What happens when AI confidently tells you something that sounds completely plausible, but is totally wrong? Erika's husband discovered this the hard way when ChatGPT served up false facts about Taylor Swift's Grammy wins with complete authority. This 'fight with the robots' quickly became a perfect example of AI hallucinations in action.
Here's the bigger picture: If AI can lie this convincingly about something as verifiable as Grammy winners, what else is it getting wrong in your business? When you're using these tools to research your industry, draft client proposals, or create content, those same confident-sounding fabrications could be undermining your professional credibility. The difference is, your competitors probably don't know how to spot the lies—but you're about to.
Key Points:
What AI hallucinations are: When AI generates outputs that sound plausible but are factually wrong, made up, or completely irrelevant
Why they happen: LLMs learn patterns, not facts. They don't have built-in truth detectors and are designed to sound confident even when wrong
Real-world consequences: From lawyers citing fake cases to professors wrongly failing students, hallucinations are causing serious problems
Math and counting issues: AI is terrible at basic calculations and word counts because it processes tokens, not individual numbers or letters
Verification strategies: Use Perplexity for sourced research, enable web search in ChatGPT/Claude, and try self-contained tools like Notebook LM
The Bottom Line:
Your expertise, real-world experience, and common sense are what make you irreplaceable in an AI-powered world. You don't have to avoid AI. You just need to know how to use it strategically while keeping your critical thinking skills sharp.
Ready to learn how to use AI as your strategic partner instead of blindly trusting its outputs? Check out the Brand-to-Bot Blueprint , where we start with crystal clear brand strategy before building any AI systems.
