This time they did it—they crossed the red line.

Advocates for “artificial intelligence” ended up with egg on their faces after a German tabloid, the weekly Die Aktuelle, published an “interview” of former Formula One world champion Michael Schumacher.

It was a gripping piece of “investigative journalism,” full of colorful narratives and salacious details of the champ’s career spanning over 21 years from 1991 to 2012, shortly before his career was ended by a debilitating head injury sustained from a skiing accident.

That accident happened more than a decade ago. After being kept in a medically-induced coma for several months, during which time surgeons carried out numerous operations to try to repair the extensive damage to his central nervous system, Schumacher was eventually coaxed out of coma.

Over the ensuing years, there has been marked improvement overall. Today he is off any life support system but cannot yet walk or communicate.

Needless to say, he couldn’t possibly have sat down many hours answering questions, let alone recall vivid details of a long storied career.

Yet, the ambitious magazine top-billed the article “Michael Schumacher: the first interview.”

There was just one problem: there never was one.

In fact, what the magazine’s editors had done was input all the details of the champion’s “curriculum vitae,” as it were, into a computer, then thrown a bunch of questions to an “artificial intelligence generator.”

They asked the machine to formulate grammatically-perfect statements of known facts from the champ’s history, accurate to the specific dates and details of every F1 racing event that he ever participated in.

Predictably, the machine produced perfect answers to every question, which the editors then used to pivot on and segue to the point of their editorial thesis: that his skiing accident “changed his life forever.”

Of course it did. Duh.

Before the accident he was a precision race driver with eagle-sharp eyes and lightning-quick reflexes. After the accident, he was a wheelchair-bound cripple who can’t feed himself. His life would never be the same. I could have told them that.

You see, human common sense can reach a logical conclusion like that faster than any “artificial intelligence” computer can even begin to ponder the question.

Ironically, an “AI” machine will pass muster if any of these annoying present-day “factcheckers” were to verify all the details of the simulated narrative it produces.

Michael Schumacher’s family are now preparing to sue the magazine—which had predictably, enjoyed a sudden upsurge in its circulation sales because of that particular “scoop interview” that wasn’t.

Do you think the magazine committed a serious blunder?

I don’t.

I think things are falling right into place as that magazine’s publisher and editors had carefully calculated before printing the interview.

Michael Schumacher is a national hero in Germany. Nobody is unaware of his latest physical condition. You can make a very strong case that no German, not even for one moment, would ever believe that a Schumacher interview could be anything but a cheap gimmick to sell copies.

In other words, something that is too obviously a ruse is not capable of defrauding anyone. It’s just like you cannot be prosecuted for forgery if you printed counterfeit THREE-DOLLAR bills. Only an imbecile would believe that three-dollar bills exist.

At least, that’s how I would argue for the accused before a German court.

But the objective of these editors, evidently, is just to stir the tempest in a teapot. Getting sued by the Schumacher family is a very acceptable risk, they must have thought. The story will bump up circulation, a bigger circulation will draw a windfall in advertising revenue, higher revenues can fund the defense in a litigation and even hedge against a successful claim for damages, with plenty of pickings still left after the dust of court battle had settled. Ka-ching!

After all, a celebrity court case will guarantee a long-running media coverage: stakeholders, advocates, proponents and opponents from both sides of the issue will get sucked into the vortex of this animated global dialogue on artificial intelligence.

Squeeze the occasion to its maximum public interest potential and you could be talking of lucrative book deals, contracts for all-media documentaries, movie adaptations—sky’s the limit in the commercial back end of all this brouhaha that has a monetizing potential in the 9- or 10-digit range.

So what’ there to worry about sharing a few million dollars in indemnity to the Schumachers?

The paradox of fake news is that it can actually generate more real profits than real news can.

And the paradox of artificial intelligence is that there’s nothing artificial about the natural intelligence-powered greed that is pushing for its development.*