I’m diving deeper into DeButts.

Yes friends, there’s been a crack in the DeButts case.

To recap, on December 3rd, Anna Navarro tweeted that Hunter DeButts, the brother-in-law of Woodrow Wilson, was pardoned. This is not true. There is no historical record of a Hunter DeButts connected to Woodrow Wilson, and Wilson certainly did not pardon him. Navarro later admitted this was incorrect, blaming a ChatGPT search result.

However, nobody could recreate the exact hallucination she posted, and the citation icons in her screenshot resembled an outdated ChatGPT interface.

Curious, I discussed this with Andrew Mayne, my co-host on The Attention Mechanism, a podcast about AI. I also asked listeners to try replicating Navarro’s prompt in ChatGPT. Shortly after, I received an email from a listener named Bret, who provided screenshots showing that while he got the same initial answers Navarro referenced—Bill Clinton pardoning Roger Clinton and Donald Trump pardoning Charles Kushner—Hunter DeButts was nowhere to be found.

Brett’s search led to a site called living.alot.com, which featured a listicle titled “Five Presidents and Governors Who Have Pardoned Family Members.” Interestingly, this article was last edited on the same day Navarro tweeted. My next move was to contact the article’s supposed author, Ron Winkler. However, the author photo appeared unmistakably AI-generated, suggesting the entire article was likely created by a generative AI model.

Investigating further, I found that living.alot.com is owned by Inuvo.com, an ad-tech company specializing in AI-driven marketing solutions. This suggested that the hallucination might not have come from ChatGPT itself but from living.alot.com, an AI-generated listicle site, possibly due to SEO optimization targeting AI-driven search engines. If ChatGPT search pulled from this listicle, it would explain the strange result Navarro saw.

Speculating further, it seems plausible that Inuvo.com, focused on generating ad revenue, might have tweaked its content after seeing traffic driven by the controversy to avoid being de-ranked or blacklisted by search algorithms. Bret’s recreation of almost the exact same search result strengthens this theory.

If anyone at OpenAI working on ChatGPT Search is reading, I recommend a hard look at de-ranking or blacklisting the alot.com suite of sites. The credibility of search-powered AI depends on filtering out such low-quality content.

In the end, the mystery of Hunter DeButts appears to be a hallucination generated by an ad-tech company leveraging AI-driven SEO tactics.

Navarro’s strange ChatGPT result wasn’t directly ChatGPT’s fault—it was fed a falsehood generated by a content-churning AI.

And with that, the Hunter DeButts saga is solved.

All’s well that ends well.

Chapters & Time Codes

* (00:00:00) Introduction: Media, Politics & New Ventures

* (00:01:20) Unmasking the Hunter DeButts Hoax

* (00:15:01) Political Shifts: Murkowski and Ocasio-Cortez

* (00:17:27) Government Shutdown Negotiations

* (00:20:26) Chris Cillizza