CNN pundit Ana Navarro came in for some brutal social media mockery this week after she cited a fictional case to defend President Joe Biden’s recent pardon of his son, Hunter.
Navarro, who is also a co-host on “The View,” took to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday to point out that Biden isn’t the first president to pardon family members.
There are in fact some examples of this, as she noted: Bill Clinton’s pardon of his brother, Roger, and Donald Trump’s pardon of his daughter’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner.
But Navarro also pointed to Woodrow Wilson’s pardon of his brother-in-law, Hunter DeButts — who, by all accounts, is fictional.
Users in the social media platform’s community notes section quickly noted there was no evidence of any person named Hunter DeButts being pardoned by Wilson.
In addition, CheckYourFact.com did a deep dive to confirm that Navarro’s post about DeButts was factually inaccurate.
Navarro was repeatedly criticized for presenting false information as factual, before she commented on her error on Tuesday afternoon, but her excuse may have been worse than the error.
“Hey Twitter sleuths, thanks for taking the time to provide context. Take it up with Chat GPT…” she wrote, and added a laughing emoji.
That post was also slapped with a community that noted that “ChatGPT” and other language models (LLMs) have been known to “hallucinate” details that are presented as fact, but are actually false.
It’s an issue that has caused problems for others, such as a lawyer who faced sanctions last year after he used to ChatGPT to prepare a court filing for his client, only for the app to invent and cite cases that never happened.
In addition, ChatGPT once put law professor Jonathan Turley on a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone — using as its source a Washington Post article that didn’t exist.
Navarro’s blaming of ChatGPT for her own errors didn’t go over so well with people on X.
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Some people felt obliged to continue the double entendre name trend started by the mention of DeButts.