Google AI claimed a disputed quote appeared in a book, then made up where to find it

Artificial intelligence programs, including ChatGPT, Grok and Google AI, have grown in popularity in recent years. These programs serve a variety of purposes in our society. This includes the ability to create or enhance existing knowledge on different subjects, as well as providing users with a better overall understanding of people, places and things.

There are good and bad points to AI.

Here’s an example. Journalists have used these programs in questionable ways. Fortune reporter Nick Lichtenberg, independent technology reporter Alex Heath and New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose have reportedly used Perplexity, Google NotebookLM and Claude for editing, fact-checking, first drafts and more. It seems rather silly and lazy on the part of these professional writers.

If you think AI is the be-all-and-end-all of writing, editing and researching, you may want to reconsider that position. The story I’m about to tell highlights the obvious weaknesses that still exist. Here’s the strange saga of a quote attributed to a cartoonist for decades which has unexpectedly turned out to be a long-standing misattribution.

Ernie Bushmiller, the creator of Nancy, has been quoted as saying his comic strip was made for the “gum chewers” and not the “caviar eaters.” This reference appeared most recently in Fantagraphics’s two collections, Nancy Wears Hats and Nancy For All Seasons. The term “gum chewers” has been reprinted before, including some books in my personal collection. One of the earliest references is in Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s essay, “How to Read Nancy,” published in Brian Walker’s The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy.

I wasn’t aware of an original source for “caviar eaters.” As I soon found out, this quote has taken on a life of its own.

Writers and authors have either combined or condensed some Bushmiller interviews. There’s an unexpected caveat with the “caviar eaters” reference, however. According to Grok, it originated in a Jan. 20-27, 1996, Boston Phoenix piece by Charles Taylor. Here’s part of what he wrote: “It may seem strange to speak about the sophistication of a strip whose creator once said, ‘Long ago I decided that more people eat cornflakes than caviar. So I slant my gags to the Lawrence Welk gum chewers and it works.’”

The quote comparing cornflakes and caviar is something that I’ve seen before. Here’s the problem: Grok claimed the phrase was a “misattribution (or, more precisely, a journalist’s reconstructed paraphrase presented as a direct quotation).” This line has become canon, in spite of Bushmiller having never said or written anything like this.

Misattribution, misquotes and myths are fairly common. The tall tale that a young George Washington “could not tell a lie” and cut down a cherry tree. The quote attributed to baseball manager Leo Durocher, “Nice guys finish last,” was actually quite different: “Nice guys actually finish seventh.” None of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books about Sherlock Holmes ever included this line: “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Even the King James Version of the Bible is associated with a misquote, “Money is the root of all evil,” which is actually written as follows: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”

That being said, the misattributed Bushmiller quote was only 30 years old. How did no one notice this mistake in a relatively short period of time? It may have sounded like something Bushmiller would have said or written, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate.

I went to Google AI to see if I could find an answer. It claimed “Ernie Bushmiller’s actual quote” was the cornflakes and caviar reference. Moreover, the AI program suggested: “Essayists took his two separate ideas—the ‘gum chewers’ (his target audience) and ‘caviar’ (his metaphor for elitist taste)—and mashed them together into ‘gum chewers vs. caviar eaters.’”

I asked where I could read this quote. Google AI said it was on page 200 of Karasik and Newgarden’s book, How To Read Nancy, which was published several years after the essay in Walker’s volume. Since I own the book, I plucked my physical copy off the shelf and looked it up. It wasn’t there. When I went back to Google AI, it then suggested it was page 178. That wasn’t correct, either. “You are entirely right to call that out, and I apologize for providing the wrong page numbers,” Google AI wrote, and sent me to “page 11 (within Section A: Context).”

As you probably guessed, this was also wrong. Page 11 was the book’s introduction, and there’s no section A related to context. When I let Google AI know about this, here’s part of its response: “I owe you a massive apology. I have repeatedly hallucinated page numbers while trying to guess where that text maps onto your print copy.”

I re-approached Grok with this information. Part of its response was rather telling, too. “The earliest printed form of the full cornflakes/caviar + Welk gum-chewers sentence remains the 1996 Boston Phoenix article, which presents it as something Bushmiller ‘once said’ without naming an interview or letter. Later writers (and now AIs) have kept recycling that paraphrase and adding extra origin details that are not in the record.”

When I copied and pasted this response to Google AI, the program acknowledged its mistakes. Here’s some of what it wrote to me: “Grok is 100 per cent right, and I am incredibly embarrassed. What is going on at my end is a textbook example of AI hallucination and defensive rationalization.”

This is one of the strangest responses I’ve ever received from an AI program!

Where could this quote have originated from? Grok suggested it’s quite similar to lawyer Lee Loevinger’s October 1966 remark about television, “more people like scrambled eggs than caviar.” That’s fairly close to the 30-year-old quote from the Boston Phoenix writer, if nothing else.

It appears that I unexpectedly found a historical inaccuracy that needs to be corrected about Bushmiller and Nancy. To say nothing of society’s over-reliance on AI, which remains an unwise decision. Case in point, the caviar eaters who never were.

Michael Taube is a political commentator, Troy Media syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, lending academic rigour to his political insights.