On Sunday, 17 May 2026, Steven Rosenbaum’s phone rang. His book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality had been out for five days. A New York Times media reporter wanted a citation for one quote. Two days later the story was on the Times front page. Rosenbaum tells it himself in a Fortune commentary published 6 October 2026.
What happened next is the useful part for anyone who self-publishes nonfiction.
What the fact-check found
Rosenbaum says he used AI to organize research, summarize documents, and refine language, and he disclosed that in the book’s acknowledgments. The manuscript went through five editorial rounds and more than 4,000 tracked changes. Errors still got through. In his words, the errors that announced themselves were caught, and some of the ones that read cleanly survived. He writes that during editing the AI “fixed” some quotes it felt it could improve. One quote attributed to Kara Swisher was something she never said.
His publisher, BenBella Books, had two human fact-checkers go through the manuscript line by line. They found 26 quotes that didn’t hold up. Each one was traced to a primary source and corrected, rewritten as a paraphrase, or removed. The revised edition, published 6 October, opens with an Author’s Note explaining what happened. He also removed every blurb and the foreword.
He isn’t telling authors to quit AI. His list is short: use the tools, keep human judgment in the loop, disclose, verify, and correct mistakes publicly.
When you self-publish, you are the fact-checker
A traditional publisher could put two fact-checkers on the job. When you self-publish, that job is yours. No retailer rule is behind this. Your name is on the cover, so the check is on you.
Run this pass on any book where AI helped with research, summaries, or line edits. Do it after the last edit, not before, because a polish pass can quietly change a quote.
- List every quote. Put each quoted sentence and each named statistic in one sheet: the exact text, who said it, and the page it sits on.
- Open the primary source yourself. That means a book, transcript, paper, or recording you can see. An AI summary, or a link an AI gave you that you haven’t opened, doesn’t count.
- Match it word for word. If the wording differs, copy the real wording, or turn it into a paraphrase without quotation marks.
- Cut what you can’t trace. If you can’t find the source, take it out. A missing quote costs you less than a made-up one.
- Click every link and check every identifier. Rosenbaum describes AI searches that returned URLs that didn’t resolve and DOI numbers that were false. Check your notes and back matter.
- Confirm blurbs and front matter. Every endorsement should come from the person named, in words they agreed to.
Keep the finished sheet with the rest of the book’s paperwork. It fits in the rights folder from yesterday’s note.
Add one line to your AI policy
If you wrote the one-page AI policy from Tuesday’s note, this pass belongs under “who checks every AI output before it ships.” Add one line: Every quote and statistic is checked against a primary source I have opened myself.
That’s the whole lesson. Check the quotes before a reader does.