adversarial archives

  1. Generative AI and Corporate Memory: The Donovan Shell Bot War

    The late‑December experiment that John Donovan staged — feeding a decades‑long archive about Royal Dutch Shell into multiple public AI assistants and publishing their divergent replies — has quietly become one of the clearest, most practical demonstrations yet of how generative AI reshapes...
  2. Donovan Shell Bot War: Adversarial Archives and AI Hallucinations

    The long-running feud between John Donovan and Royal Dutch Shell has entered a new, surreal phase: a public “bot war” in which generative AIs — prompted from a partisan archive and then set against one another — openly contradict, correct, and amplify contested claims about events that began in...
  3. Shell vs The Bots: Adversarial Archives and AI Hallucination Risks

    John Donovan’s two December 26, 2025 postings on royaldutchshellplc.com — framed as “Shell vs. The Bots” and a satirical “ShellBot Briefing 404” — are not merely another chapter in a decades‑long personal feud; they are a deliberate test case for how adversarial archives interact with modern...