AI is going just great.

The Mississippi Free Press published an opinion column on April 7 before discovering it was AI-generated and its supposed author was entirely fictional — fake name, fake headshot, fake social media profiles, and a résumé linking to a company whose editor had already caught the same person running the same con. The ruse only unraveled when the phantom columnist submitted an invoice that didn't match their name.

Further digging revealed a "raft" of similar AI-generated submissions from other fake authors, apparently originating outside the country — none of which were published. The outlet has since pulled three additional queued columns showing similar red flags, and is now working on a formal AI policy, staff training, and tighter vetting. As for AI detectors: the editor notes they're not very reliable, which is a fun problem to have when the fakes are getting better every day.

Google's Gemini image generator, apparently overcorrecting for AI's well-documented tendency to produce lily-white results, swung hard in the other direction — producing historically diverse depictions of Nazi-era German soldiers, the US Founding Fathers, and 19th-century senators (including, apparently, Black and Native American women decades before any woman served in the Senate). Google called it "missing the mark," which is one way to put it.

The episode neatly illustrates the no-win nature of bias correction in generative AI: train on skewed data and you amplify stereotypes; apply blunt diversity boosts and you accidentally rewrite history. Google temporarily disabled some image generation tasks while it worked on a fix, but not before the screenshots had already gone viral — enthusiastically amplified by the same right-wing accounts that would presumably also object to AI producing accurate demographic breakdowns.