There's no doubt that Kevin Donovan of the Toronto Star is one of the best investigative reporters in the business right now. He's broken a ton of stories and has arguably been the #1 expert on the still unsolved murder mystery of Barry & Honey Sherman back in 2017. 

So I was a bit surprised that, with no real leads and no new facts or developments, he decided to turn the story over to an A.I. for analysis. He openly admits in the tale being run on the newspaper's website on Monday that this Artificial Intelligence bot immediately started making errors, presented as facts. 

(My computer comes with an A.I. program built in, Microsoft's Co-Pilot, and it constantly gets almost everything wrong. When I call it on the errors, it apologizes, then just confidently makes more mistakes. I no longer believe anything it tells me and rarely use it anymore.)

I'm not sure why Donovan did something like this or why he would think this was a good idea, knowing how careful he is and how completely unreliable this technology is. Still, I suppose an update to a story that has no update is better than nothing, but I'm kind of surprised a reporter of his calibre would misfire on a stunt like this. 

He learned almost nothing new except what I already knew - Artificial Intelligence is definitely artificial and it's anything but intelligent. 

I asked AI to scan thousands of Barry and Honey Sherman murder case documents. Here’s what it told me I missed