When the Pink-Slime Researchers Become the Pink Slime

We love to hear when journalists engage with our research, so in October, we set up an LLM agent to sort through Google Alerts for Tow Center’s work and notify us when our research is cited in news. The bot began to diligently filter alerts for new mentions of the Tow Center and sent us Slack notifications with references to our work. We celebrated the small wins.

But not even a week in, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia—his own AI-generated misinformation-peddling version of Wikipedia—and we began receiving notifications about sites we had never heard of quoting our director, Professor Emily Bell, talking about the launch.