What does sloths pooping avocado seeds have to do with enterprise AI?
You’ve probably heard this fun fact: giant ground sloths were responsible for spreading avocados because they were able to eat the pits and later disperse them miles away - something smaller mammals couldn’t do.
Just one problem. This is likely untrue!
This “fact” began its life as a speculative mention in a journal that slipped past peer review. But since then, it has been cited and mentioned so many times that the frequency alone has become an indicator of truth. It’s repeated in articles, podcasts and even by scientists. The very excellent educational YouTube channel SciShow recently published a correction episode explaining this mistake.
Right now, your engineering team is celebrating because they just plugged an LLM into your corporate knowledge base.
But if you work in AI Governance or Risk, you know your SharePoint is full of sloths: deprecated policies, draft memos from decades past and unvetted Slack opinions.
Here’s why that’s a problem, as outlined in the Crossfactor Atlas
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Unearned Warrant - A Monday morning brain-fart from a 3-year-old project channel gets retrieved by your AI. Because it is being served up by an “intelligent” system, without any of the original context, it is granted unearned warrant. It is given the same corporate weight as formal, reviewed documents the system also queries.
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Surface Credibility - Because the AI outputs obsolete information with perfect grammar and authoritative formatting, your employees blindly trust it. The cleanliness of the output hides the messy nature of the input.
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Authority Capture - The AI’s output gets included into a new reference document. The document gets included into a new SOP. The dirty AI output has now accrued the ultimate trust and citational weight faster than your Governance team can establish accountability.
Your LLM doesn’t need to hallucinate to poison your institutional knowledge.
Does your team have the vocabulary to find these hidden failure modes?
(P.S. I map out over 200 of these exact sociotechnical risks in the Crossfactor Atlas. DM me if you want a copy).