Yes, it's a big problem. I call it "agency laundering" and I first mentioned it in this article last year: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/08/is-ai...

Treating AI models as autonomous minds lets companies shift responsibility for tech failures.

> No one is admitting it but AI is one of the easiest ways to shift blame.

Similar to what Facebook, Google, Twitter/X, Tiktok etc have been doing for a long time using the platform-excuse. "We are just a platform. We are not to blame for all this illegal or repugnant content. We do not have resources to remove it."

It sounds like in this case there was some troll-fueled comeuppance.

> “We’re not a scam,” he continued. “We’re a married couple trying to do the right thing by people … We are legit, we are real people, we employ sales staff.”

> Australian Tours and Cruises told CNN Tuesday that “the online hate and damage to our business reputation has been absolutely soul-destroying.”

This might just be BS, but at face-value, this is a mom and pop shop that screwed up playing the SEO game and are getting raked over the internet coals.

Your broader point about blame-washing stands though.

There's a book "The Unaccountability Machine" that HN may be interested in. Takes a much broader approach across management systems.

Commercial enterprises seem designed to launder responsibility, this is perhaps the ultimate version of that system.

I hope that this will result in people paying a premium for human curation and accountability, but I won't hold my breath.

I somewhat disagree, because at the end of the day he still has to take responsibility for the fuckup and that will matter in terms of dollars and reputation. I think this is also why a lot of roles just won't speed up that much, the bottleneck will be verification of outputs because it is still the human's job on the line.

An on the nose example would be, if your CEO asked you for a report, and you delivered fake data, do you think he would be satisfied with the excuse that AI got it wrong? Customers are going to feel the same way, AI or human, you (the company, the employee) messed up.

this is incorrect. it has the concept of truth and facts.

> It is however fraud on the part of the travel company to advertise something that doesn't exist

Just here to point out that from a legal perspective, fraud is deliberate deception.

In this case a tourist agency outsourced the creation of their marketing material to a company who used AI to produce it, with hallucinations. From the article it doesn't look like either of the two companies advertised the details knowing they're wrong, or had the intent to deceive.

Posting wrong details on a blog out of carelessness and without deliberate ill intention is not fraud more than using a wrong definition of fraud is fraud.

Seems like closer to fraud on behalf of the marketing company they outsourced to.

I doubt they commissioned articles on things that don't exist. If you use AI to perform a task that someone has asked you to do, it should be your responsibility to ensure that it has actually done that thing properly.

The consequences for wrong ai need to be a lot higher if we want to limit slop. Of course, there’s space for llms and their hallucinations to contribute meaningful things, but we need at least a screaming all caps disclaimer on content that looks like it could be human-generated but wasn’t (and absent that disclaimer or if the disclaimer was insufficiently prominent, false statements are treated as deliberate fraud)

> Seems like you could just google what's in the town

You'll still get an AI generate answer at the top, followed by 3 AI generated sponsored blog scams, etc.

You probably need to update every now and the because of SEO and such.

The goal is to attract search traffic to your page, so that you can promote your product or your brand. AI is making this a lot cheaper than before because you don't even need to create the content, but it's also killing the overall amount of traffic to all websites.

If you actually take pride in your work, it's a double whammy of competing with AI slop and losing over half of your traffic to AI summaries.

Useful independent websites are so cooked.

It seems very likely if you go back in time far enough the region was very hot. Something around 4.5 billion years should do it.

> Tell ChatGPT to multiply 129348723423 and 2987892342424 and it'll probably get it wrong because nowhere on Reddit is that exact question for it to copy. But what's interesting is it'll tend to get the first and large digits correct (more often than not) but the middle is just noise.

People have no idea how capable LLM's are and confidently write these kind of things.