In the previously linked Washington Post article revealing the list of donors and the vast sums they gave to Trump’s vanity ballroom, is this paragraph:

Absent from the list is Trump himself, who has said that he is helping to pay for the project. “It’s being paid for a hundred percent by me and some friends of mine,” he said last year, days after demolition began on the old East Wing.

I generally remove the cruft—often trackers—from URLs I share as a matter of course, so it amused me that the original link for the word “said” contained this at the end of it: ?utm_source=chatgpt.com

ChatGPT adds that tracker to any URL it shares during a chat session. Clicking the link tells the website where the traffic came from.

(It’s similar to the ?ref=jagsworkshop.com appended to the end of links on this site.)

At best, it means someone at The Washington Post used ChatGPT to find that link, then copied and pasted it into the article without remembering (or knowing) to remove the tracker. I can imagine a prompt like “find me a transcript of Donald Trump saying his ballroom would be paid for by him and his friends.”

At worst, it suggests someone at WaPo used ChatGPT to write that paragraph. I fervently hope that’s not the case.