Yesterday I received an email from a person in Canada. This person said that his good friend — a 76-year-old former Humboldt County person who had gone to Arcata High School — had come across a reference to a story I had written in 2005, when I worked at the North Coast Journal. This person and his friend wondered if I might be able to send them a copy of this story.

The story, I was told, was titled “Out Of The Past: Arcata High’s Kampus Klan photo remains an open wound,” and it was about a reckoning at Arcata High having to do with white supremacist imagery published in the school’s 1967 yearbook.

I had no recollection of writing this story, which I didn’t find all that surprising. It was 20 years ago, and I’ve written thousands of things in the meanwhile, and being decidedly older than I once was things often slip my memory.

What was far more surprising is that I could find no trace of this story. The North Coast Journal’s online archives are pretty janky and hard to search, but they’re there, and they go back very far. This story was not in them.

I wrote my correspondent back to tell him that I was a bit puzzled. I couldn’t find the story anywhere, and I couldn’t recall the details. Where did his friend, the 76-year-old former Humboldter, see this reference to this story I had supposedly written?

The friend himself wrote me back, and he sent the text that had put him on my trail. Here is part of it:

Publication: North Coast Journal
Title: “Out of the Past: Arcata High’s ‘Kampus Klan’ photo remains an open wound”
Author: Hank Sims
Date: February 24, 2005

This article is a deep dive into the incident, exploring its lasting impact on the community and including interviews and accounts from people who were there.

The Incident: The photo, published a decade earlier, depicted four white male students, one wearing a makeshift Ku Klux Klan-style hood, posing on the school’s “Kampus Klan” bleachers. The yearbook’s faculty advisor claimed she was unaware of the photo’s inclusion, blaming a printing error. For years, the image went largely unnoticed.

The Reckoning: In 2004, a current student discovered the photo and brought it to the attention of the school and community, igniting a firestorm. The article details the intense and painful public meetings where Arcata’s self-image as a progressive, tolerant community was severely challenged. Alumni, current students, and community members — particularly people of color — spoke out about the long history of racism and exclusion they had experienced, which the photo symbolized.

This synopsis went on to name all the students involved in the photo. It named 11 names, at least some of which belong to people who are still living here in Humboldt County today — people whose names you might know, or who you might know personally. Your neighbors.

I’m not going to share those names with you. Why not? Because as you’ve probably guessed, the story so confidently summarized here never existed, and the incident it describes is pure bullshit. It was invented by a chatbot that the gentleman was chatting with.

That’s all to say: This kind of stuff is coming for you, here in Humboldt. Most of us have become used to the fact that Facebook and YouTube are chock-full of AI slop designed to make us engage, for just a split-second, with wonder or fury. But now we see people posting screenshots of some Google AI answer to a question as if the Word of God has descended to settle the argument. A local news organization uses a large language model to write a good number of its stories, and it doesn’t correct the obvious inaccuracies nor inform its readers of what it is doing.

You might think the Outpost a flawed messenger, here. We’ve used automation since the very first days of this site, and we’ve used ChatGPT and other LLMs since they first came available a couple of years ago — to transcribe interviews, to translate our stories into Spanish, to summarize public meeting documents and attempt to reword cop-speak into plain English in our CHP logs.

But I would hold that the difference between us and the very bad uses of AI mentioned above are two-fold: We disclose and disclaim what is written by a bot, and — just as importantly — we don’t ask the bot to do things it can’t actually do.

Here’s what large language models, as currently constituted, are very good at, in our experience: Taking a chunk of text and doing some predefined task with that text. Take this government document and summarize it for a person with a 10th-grade reading level. Now render it in French. Now generate a voice to read it to me aloud. Large language models can do this sort of thing with a very, very high degree of accuracy.

What they can’t do with a high degree of accuracy is answer open-ended questions. If you ask one of them about life, the universe and everything — or whether there was racism at Arcata High in the 1960s — it will give you a very authoritative­ answer, but one that may or may not be stuffed full of nonsense and lies.

I wonder how my correspondent in Canada is doing, investigating his former high school classmates. Last I heard, he fed my denial of having authored this story back into the chatbot, which sought to please him by conceding the point and dissecting possible ways in which this “hoax” came into being.

One of those ways was through someone – some human’s — “possible conflation of events.” Apparently he asked the bot to follow up on that lead — what events could have been conflated? — because later he sent me this:

The Immediate Catalyst: The “Kampus Klan” Leaflets

The controversy erupted in April 1967.

The Publication: A group of four white students at Arcata High School created and distributed anonymously typed leaflets around the school. These leaflets announced the formation of a “Kampus Klan” and were filled with virulently racist language and threats.

The Content: The leaflets explicitly targeted the small number of Black students at the school. They used racial slurs, advocated for segregation, and included threats of violence. The name “Kampus Klan” was a deliberate and unmistakable reference to the Ku Klux Klan, invoking its history of terror and racism.

The leaflets announced the formation of a “Kampus Klan” and included statements like:

• “The Kampus Klan is now in effect.”
• It used racial slurs, particularly the “N-word,” to refer to Black students.
• It contained explicit threats, such as “Stay off the campus or else” and “We will get you.”
• It advocated for segregation, demanding that Black students leave the school and stay out of white neighborhoods.
• Some accounts recall phrases like “Go back to Africa” or other white supremacist rhetoric common to the era.

I wrote my guy back to tell him: No, no, that’s not true either! But I haven’t heard from him since.