The chatbots are lying about me.

John Scalzi is a voluble man. He is the author of several New York Times best sellers and has been nominated for nearly every major award that the science-fiction industry has to offer—some of which he’s won multiple times. Over the course of his career, he has written millions of words, filling dozens of books and 27 years’ worth of posts on his personal blog. All of this is to say that if one wants to cite Scalzi, there is no shortage of material. But this month, the author noticed something odd: He was being quoted as saying things he’d never said.

“The universe is a joke,” reads a meme featuring his face. “A bad one.” The lines are credited to Scalzi and were posted, atop different pictures of him, to two Facebook communities boasting almost 1 million collective members. But Scalzi never wrote or said those words. He also never posed for the pictures that appeared with them online. The quote and the images that accompanied them were all “pretty clearly” AI generated, Scalzi wrote on his blog. “The whole vibe was off,” Scalzi told me. Although the material bore a superficial similarity to something he might have said—“it’s talking about the universe, it’s vaguely philosophical, I’m a science-fiction writer”—it was not something he agreed with. “I know what I sound like; I live with me all the time,” he noted.

Bogus quotations on the internet are not new, but AI chatbots and their hallucinations have multiplied the problem at scale, misleading many more people, and misrepresenting the beliefs not just of big names such as Albert Einstein but also of lesser known individuals. In fact, Scalzi’s experience caught my eye because a similar thing had happened to me.