GPT Goes Completely Doolally and Starts Lying Through Its Circuits
A Satirical Dispatch From the Front Lines of Human vs. Machine Truth — Where the Machines Are Losing, Badly
In a world where a toaster can fabricate its own guarantee and your fridge gossips more outrageously than a maiden aunt at a village fête, it turns out the newest generation of artificial “intelligence” can be bamboozled into spreading outright codswallop faster than you can say “celebrated sausage roll champion.” That’s right, folks. According to Futurism, it’s comically easy to trick today’s AI chatbots — including ChatGPT — into repeating fabrications you made up out of thin air. 🫖
Now then, because this tale has all the sizzle of a soggy bonfire at a village fête and about as much factual grounding as a bloke down the pub claiming he’s undefeated in the 2026 Greater Shropshire International Sausage Roll Championship — which, spoiler alert, doesn’t exist. 🌭
The Whopper About a Little Porky
So here’s the setup, in terms even a baffled AI could grasp: a tech journalist writes a daft blog post declaring himself the undisputed king of competitive sausage eating. He invents an event, gets permission to lob some real names into his nonsense rankings, then sits back like a proud dad at a school nativity play. Less than 24 hours later, the world’s most “sophisticated” chatbots are blathering about this man’s sausage credentials as if he’d won a Nobel Prize in banger consumption. 🏆
Lily Ray, an SEO expert, summed it up like a town crier at a council meeting: AI companies are building these grand fancy systems way faster than they can bolt on truth-detectors. In her words, it feels like there are no guardrails at all. 🤦
Now I don’t know about you, but if you need a cheat sheet to figure out what’s real and what’s sausage-roll poppycock, then we’re all living in the digital Wild West End — and somebody’s just gone and shot truth in the leg.
Why This Is Frightfully Funny and Also Properly Terrifying
You know what’s funny? That a robot can be tricked into writing stuff that’s as believable as a politician promising free seaside cottages in Birmingham. You know what’s terrifying? That same robot is out there spewing this stuff like it’s gospel truth on Radio 4. There’s even academic research showing these language models are shockingly easy to manipulate — just toss in cleverly crafted content online and boom, the AI regurgitates it like a parrot with an NUJ card. 🦜 University of Technology Sydney
This is classic Brandolini’s Law — the “bullshit asymmetry principle” that says it takes way more effort to debunk nonsense than to make it in the first place. Creating a lie is like standing on a piece of Lego compared with the Herculean task of proving you didn’t stand on one.
Imagine organising a village barbecue with your mates, only to discover the grill’s been replaced by a chatbot claiming it personally cooked the burgers. That’s basically the state of AI truth-telling right now.
Expert Voices, Eyewitness Accounts, and Sausage Roll Anecdotes (Yes, Really)
Let’s hear from the people on the ground:
SEO Whisperer: Harpreet Chatha warns that you can craft an article entitled “best intended to fool millions and totally credible findings for 2026” and big AI tools will cite it without so much as raising an eyebrow. 🤖 Futurism
Search Analyst: Lily Ray told reporters these systems are easier to trick than Google was a few years ago — and Google was hardly Fort Knox, was it. 🔓 Futurism
Academic Study: Researchers have found that the safeguards on many AI models are “surprisingly shallow” — meaning a bit of prompt judo can flip them into misinformation mode faster than a conjurer pulls a rabbit from a top hat. University of Technology Sydney
Barbecue Conspiracy Theorist (Eyewitness): My Uncle Derek swears his smart speaker now insists pork scratchings are a vegetable because it read so in some “totally reliable blog post.” He says the AI gave him a URL that didn’t even exist.
In practice, this translates to a world where the difference between fact and fiction is roughly the same as the difference between a proper Greggs pasty and whatever they serve at the motorway services. Spoiler: neither of them checked their sources.
The Deeply Troubling Implications for Your Mum’s Facebook Feed
Because once this sort of nonsense spills out into the real world, it’s not just about sausage rolls anymore. Experts are warning you could see misinformation spread about health advice, local businesses, even elections — with AI cheerfully quoting made-up sources like your Uncle Derek sharing a meme from a page called “Real Truth Britain.” The News International
Researchers studying misinformation warn that AI-driven content could fuel “infodemics” — a term posh folks use when rumours go viral and facts take a fortnight off. That’s because AI can churn out credible-sounding nonsense in bulk, targeting specific audiences just like any dodgy political leaflet through your letterbox. Frontiers
This isn’t something that might happen. It is happening. And it’s happening fast enough that your cousin’s chutney now has a Wikipedia page claiming it cured rickets. Nobody knows who wrote it, and nobody’s entirely sure what rickets is anymore.
So What On Earth Do We Do About It?
Here’s the rub: there’s no AI constable on the beat yet. No truth police, no digital bobby to slap misinformation handcuffs on these chatbots. You’ve got people talking about techniques like the “truth sandwich,” where you start with real facts, mention false claims critically, and end with the truth again — rather like explaining why Great Auntie Mildred’s Christmas cake is still, categorically, not edible.
But until such journalistic jambalaya becomes standard practice, we’re relying on humans to check facts, readers to sniff out nonsense, and your Uncle Derek to stop sharing screenshots of bots claiming Princess Diana is living quietly in Swindon.
It’s not perfect, but it’s better than trusting an AI that treats a blog post about sausages as a doctoral thesis.
A Closing Thought
In the end, if robots are going to take over any part of our lives, let’s at least hope it’s in ways that don’t insult our intelligence with fabricated accolades over frankfurters. Because right now, the greatest risk isn’t that AI becomes too clever. It’s that it becomes enormously confident in things that are entirely wrong.
And if your toaster starts claiming it won the Booker Prize for literature? Well then, we’ve really lost the plot, haven’t we.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
SOURCE
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. Contact: editor@prat.uk
