To access the gift article, append ?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.pdAn.jWyx6dpYv6wL&smid=nytcore-ios-share to the URL.
Recently, I received a strange text from a new acquaintance. “You have your own biography???” it read. “How did you neglect to tell me this?”
This was news to me. I went to Amazon to investigate. There it was. A biography of Kashmir Hill — title: “The Biography of Kashmir Hill” — had been released nearly a year earlier, in August 2025. My life story had a mottled brown cover and a publisher I’d never heard of before. It had no reviews until I wrote one, asking, as the subject of this work, if I could please speak to the author. The hardcover cost $26.99, which seemed a bit steep, but my editor splurged on a copy and I was forced to read it.
My biography is 90 pages long and should be shorter. It combines facts about me that are widely available on the internet, such as where I grew up, with generic insights that could be true of anyone, like a horoscope spread over dozens of pages. “You cannot understand Kashmir Hill without understanding her contradictions,” my biographer wrote, along with an excruciatingly long description of my elaborate coffee-making ritual. (Fact check: My husband does it.)
The book is flattering, fabricated and absolutely packed with em dashes. It bears all the signs of A.I. slop. I clicked on the author, one John Crane Miller. His bio page described him as a “seasoned biographer and cultural analyst,” and his portrait was a widely used stock photo of a white man in a suit speaking at a conference. “The Biography of Kashmir Hill: The New York Times Technology Journalist Who Exposed Clearview AI, Challenged Big Tech and Redefined Privacy in the Digital Age” was one of 10 biographies that Mr. Miller had published in a single week, all of them about journalists, including my Times colleague Mike Isaac; Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic; and Jake Tapper of CNN.
I could not, in good conscience, post this under “Literature.”
So many systems breaking down. So many lives hurt. Pandoras box indeed.
I would have written you a much better biography probably. It’s a real shame you decided to use AI instead.
/disappointed
It’s back to the days of hagiography as they seem to note in the piece.
Massive scribal machines honing memes, legends, humour, art and gossip into more polished and pleasing narratives for the target audiences of the time.
They are still feeding the younglings on some slop version of Anne Frank’s Diary, bible schools are teaching of ‘authentic letters’ of St Paul of Tarsus. Muhammad uttered the entire Qur’an word according to the local mosque, Kashmir makes coffee…this has been ongoing since Adam was a boy.
First thought is to pirate the biography and feed it, alongside the linked article, to a cutting edge massive llm and ask for a revised version in light of the subject’s feedback.
