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arXiv · 2508.08143

AI Gossip

Joel Krueger·Lucy Osler
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Abstract

Generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini routinely make things up. They "hallucinate" historical events and figures, legal cases, academic papers, non-existent tech products and features, biographies, and news articles. Recently, some have argued that these hallucinations are better understood as bullshit. Chatbots produce rich streams of text that look truth-apt without any concern for the truthfulness of what this text says. But can they also gossip? We argue that they can. After some definitions and scene-setting, we focus on a recent example to clarify what AI gossip looks like before considering some distinct harms -- what we call "technosocial harms" -- that follow from it.

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Joel Krueger, Lucy Osler. 2025-08-11. AI Gossip. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08143

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