{"id":2045,"date":"2025-06-03T13:03:54","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T13:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/business-insider-ai-reading-list\/"},"modified":"2025-06-03T13:03:54","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T13:03:54","slug":"business-insider-ai-reading-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/business-insider-ai-reading-list\/","title":{"rendered":"Business Insider Did Something So Stupid With AI That We\u2019re Reeling"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1200\" height=\"630\" src=\"https:\/\/wordpress-assets.futurism.com\/2025\/06\/business-insider-ai-reading-list.jpg\" class=\"attachment-full size-full wp-post-image\" alt=\"Amid\u00a0Business Insider's latest pivot to AI, the site's past brushes with the technology are coming back to haunt it.\" style=\"margin-bottom: 15px;\" decoding=\"async\"><\/div>\n<p>Amid\u00a0Business Insider&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/business-insiders-parent-company-signs-deal-openai\">latest pivot to AI<\/a>, the site&#8217;s past brushes with the technology are coming back to haunt it.<\/p>\n<p>As\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.semafor.com\/article\/06\/01\/2025\/business-insider-recommended-nonexistent-books-to-staff-as-it-leans-into-ai\"><em>Semafor<\/em> reports<\/a>, a manager recommended fake, seemingly-AI-generated books to underlings last year on a reading list meant to help them better understand business journalism.<\/p>\n<p>In the staff email, which was leaked to\u00a0<em>Semafor<\/em>, the senior <em>BI<\/em> manager suggested well-known titles like Andrew Ross Sorkin&#8217;s classic &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/6687247-too-big-to-fail\">Too Big To Fail<\/a>,&#8221; about the Wall Street crash of 2008, and &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2005\/apr\/23\/film.highereducation\">DisneyWar<\/a>&#8221; by James Stewart, which exposed the tumultuous behind-the-scenes drama at the famed studio some 20 years ago.<\/p>\n<p>Those were recommended alongside books that nobody had heard of, with names like &#8220;Simply Target: A CEO\u2019s Lessons in a Turbulent Time and Transforming an Iconic Brand&#8221; by Gregg Steinhafel, the former chief executive of the big-box chain, and &#8220;The House of Morgan: An Intimate Portrait of the Most Powerful Banking Family in the World,&#8221; by purported author Fredric Morgan.<\/p>\n<p>But <em>Semafor<\/em> was unable to find any evidence that those titles had ever been published. Some were <em>similar<\/em> to real books \u2014 like the legitimate book &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.publishersweekly.com\/9780671734008\">The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance<\/a>&#8221; by Ron Chernow \u2014 while others seem to have been completely made up.<\/p>\n<p>One of the books on the most ludicrous falsehoods on the list was &#8220;Mark Zuckerberg Autobiography: The Man Behind the Code,&#8221; a purported autobiography of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that <em>also<\/em> claims to have been written by a &#8220;Jasper Robin.&#8221; (An autobiography, obviously, is written by its subject.)<\/p>\n<p>Though Zuckerberg has been the subject of at least a few biographies written by other people, none of them have been named &#8220;Jasper Robin,&#8221; and in fact, we were not able to find anything about said author except for their <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/author\/show\/43839952.Jasper_Robin\">author page on Goodreads<\/a>, which also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/198421684-mark-zuckerberg-autobiography\">links to the title<\/a> in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/198421684-mark-zuckerberg-autobiography\">Italian<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/author\/show\/43839952.Jasper_Robin\">German<\/a> \u2014 but not to any booksellers.<\/p>\n<p>Though\u00a0<em>BI<\/em> didn&#8217;t admit the source for those phony titles either in leaked documents or in requests for comment from\u00a0<em>Semafor<\/em>, it doesn&#8217;t take a deep investigation to figure out where they almost certainly came from \u2014 especially given that the company is now investing in AI, and is planning to <a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/2025\/digital\/news\/business-insider-layoffs-shift-toward-ai-live-events-1236412950\/\">lay off 21 percent of its workforce<\/a> amid its pivot to using the <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/ai-industry-problem-smarter-hallucinating\">hallucination-happy technology<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In a memo to staff announcing the layoffs that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/a-note-from-business-insiders-ceo\">later published on its website<\/a>, <em>BI\u00a0<\/em>CEO Barbara Peng said that the company is &#8220;going all-in on AI&#8221; and experiencing growing pains as it does.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Change like this isn&#8217;t easy,&#8221; Peng wrote. &#8220;But <em>Business Insider<\/em> was born in a time of disruption \u2014 when the smartphone was reshaping how people consumed news. We thrived by taking risks and building something new.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>To say that <em>BI<\/em> has &#8220;thrived&#8221; may be an overstatement. The site has long been winnowing its workforce; along with the latest cuts, the company <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2024\/01\/25\/media\/business-insider-layoffs\">laid off eight percent of its workforce<\/a> last year and <a href=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/business-insider-layoffs-ai-chatgpt-tests-1850356792\">axed 10 percent of its roles<\/a>\u00a0in 2023 \u2014 and in that instance, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/2023\/04\/13\/insiders-newsroom-will-start-experimenting-with-ai\">AI experiments were also announced<\/a> around the same time.<\/p>\n<p>And when senior managers are recommending books they haven&#8217;t even read, nevermind verified they&#8217;re real, it&#8217;s easy to see why.<\/p>\n<p><strong>More on hallucinatory citations:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/rfk-jr-make-america-healthy-again-report-studies-ai\"><em>RFK Jr&#8217;s &#8220;Make America Healthy Again&#8221; Report Cites Studies That Don&#8217;t Exist, in Clear Sign of AI Generated Slop<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/business-insider-ai-reading-list\">Business Insider Did Something So Stupid With AI That We\u2019re Reeling<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/\">Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Amid\u00a0Business Insider&#8217;s latest pivot to AI, the site&#8217;s past brushes with the technology are coming back to haunt it. As\u00a0Semafor reports, a manager recommended fake, seemingly-AI-generated books to underlings last&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1164,414,177,1339,1340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai-hallucinations","category-ai-journalism","category-artificial-intelligence","category-business-insider","category-layoffs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}