A billion apologies

The organizers at the March for Billionaires can’t stress enough that they hand-picked the billionaires on their list of “value creators” without the use of AI and that Gazetteer SF’s human reporters and editor could use some help counting.

Yesterday, we published a short item about the maybe prank march on Saturday in Pacific Heights that contained an error of counting: The probably slop-generated March for Billionaires site listed ten oligarchs, not nine.

That one is on us. The original story has been updated.

We still have no clue who these people are, or why they are so adamant about the fact that this enterprise is human-run (with a lot of help from AI). Are they pranksters like press-hungry programmer Riley Walz or stunt-woman Danielle Egan? Or will they seriously, earnestly be celebrating billionaires’ many wonderful contributions (other than taxes) at Alta Plaza Park this weekend?

Who’s to say? (And, honestly, who is to care?) We look forward to reading the accounts of the event by our colleagues at the Standard and the California Post.

Below is the full statement from the event’s anonymous, totally human founders to Gazetteer following the publication of our story:

To clarify: the billionaires on the list were not chosen by AI, but by humans. Also there are 10, not 9. If you asked an AI to come up with a list of billionaires who aren’t hated you would end up with a fairly different list.

Some single sentence descriptions were written by humans and reworded with AI, while some were generated with AI and edited by humans. It isn’t possible to reliably detect the provenance of single sentences, as I’m sure Spero can tell you.

Further, this message and the preceding ones were written by a human unaided by AI.

Thank you, and we look forward to your corrections

And so, here it is.

We regret the error and having written about this in the first place. As Mark Twain once famously said, “To err is human, to forgive, anonymous Billionaire March founders.”