If you make an error when speaking to others, how far should you go to correct it?
Almost 15 years ago, I was interviewed by an anchor in the studio of a morning news program about the ethics of forgiveness. Without my knowing it, the person responsible for writing the identification that appeared under my name wrote “Ethicist and Clinical Psychologist.” I couldn’t see the identification as I was speaking to the anchor and only found out on my drive home when my wife, who is a licensed mental health therapist, called me to let me know she had watched the interview and told me of the mistake.
I believed the right thing to do was to let the program know and also to let my college public affairs office know of the mistake so it didn’t misidentify me if they shared a copy of the interview on social media. (The interviewer was an alumnus of the college where I taught at the time.)
In that case, the error wasn’t mine.
A few weeks ago, I was a guest on a podcast to talk about the ethics of artificial intelligence. The interviewer asked terrific questions and we talked some of the propensity of AI chatbots to make mistakes. Turns out that and other observations in the podcast were true, but it was I who made an unforced error during our discussion. In referring to an article I had written years ago for a magazine that the podcast interviewer and I worked for, I made a passing reference to the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) when I meant to refer to the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration).
It's likely that few people listening to the podcast will notice the error. I only caught it when the interviewer sent me a link to the podcast after it had been edited and went live. The error also doesn’t change the intent of what I was saying in the sentence where I used the wrong acronym. Nevertheless, it was a mistake.
My options are to say nothing to anyone since, again, few if any are likely to notice. But that doesn’t seem the right thing to do. Instead, I let the podcast interviewer know and I am using this column to come clean and admit the error. It was my mistake, not his or anyone else’s.
In the podcast, I talk about the importance of checking the facts of anything an AI chatbot might create for you. A few weeks ago in The Right Thing column, I wrote about how various AI chatbots had gotten information about me wrong when I asked them to write an obituary for me. The chatbots created a wife who doesn’t exist along with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who had beautiful names but who also don’t exist. (My wife, children, grandchildren and great-grandchild are all beautiful in real life.) I was also given credit for books I didn’t write and fellowships I never received.
There’s an old journalism saw that goes something like: “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” The same thing goes for when you hear a white-haired and bearded ethics columnist tell you stuff on a podcast. Before you spread what he has to say, check it out.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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