Secretary of State Monae Johnson may be hallucinating…
In the opening paragraph of her introduction to her funny little 2026 Q1 economic report, Secretary Johnson refers to “headwinds” through which South Dakota’s economy has demonstrated its “resilience and optimism”:
Over the past several years, the national and global economy has continued to face significant uncertainty and transition. Ongoing international trade tensions, shifting tariff policies, inflationary pressures, and disruptions in agricultural and manufacturing markets continue to shape economic conversations across the country. South Dakota has not been immune to these challenges, including the recent closure of the state’s Hormel facility, which has had ripple effects on workers, families, and regional economies.
Despite these headwinds, South Dakota’s economy continues to demonstrate remarkable resilience and optimism. One of the strongest indicators of that optimism is the continued growth in business formation across our state. During the first quarter of 2026, South Dakota LLC filings approached 4,000, surpassing first-quarter totals from each of the previous six years. These numbers reflect the entrepreneurial spirit that continues to define our state as individuals take risks, invest in their communities, and create new opportunities for future growth [Secretary of State Monae L. Johnson and Dakota Wesleyan University, 2026 Q1 Business and Economic Data Analysis Summary, 2026.05.21, p. 1].
“…the recent closure of the state’s Hormel facility…”—wait, what? Did I miss something? I was not aware that South Dakota had a Hormel facility, let alone that one had closed recently. Cimpl’s Meats shut down its slaughterhouse in Yankton in March 2025 and moved operations to a new plant less than an hour west of St. Louis, Missouri (where cattle are cheaper and workers more plentiful), but Cimpl’s belonged to Green Bay Wisconsin-based American Foods Group, not Austin Minnesota-based Hormel Foods. Aside from Cimpl’s departure, I can’t find reference to any recent major meatpacking closure in South Dakota. Among news items the Secretary may have misremembered, Wholestone Farms closed its butchery and bailed on building a big hog chop shop in Sioux Falls in 2023 after it received big government pork to expand the Nebraska facility it bought from Hormel in 2018, but that had nothing to do with Hormel operating or ceasing to operate in South Dakota. Sioux Falls just avoided losing the big Smithfield slaughterhouse by swinging a state-sweetened deal for the Chinese-owned meatpacker to set up a new plant in Crooks, but Hormel has no part in that move.
(A former Hormel lobbyist now propagandizes for South Dakota’s Beef Checkoff program—maybe we could ask him?)
Unless I’m forgetting some famous fixture of South Dakota’s critter-killing industry, it appears Secretary Johnson is hallucinating…
…or maybe Secretary Johnson had an artificial intelligence large-language model write her summary for her, and the AI LLM robot exercised its inherent and inevitable falsification. I ran the first three paragraphs of Secretary Johnson’s intro through four free AI detectors—ZeroGPT, GPTZero, HumanizeAI, and Quillbot—and they all said the SOS’s introduction was almost definitely (actual results: 100%, 100%, 98%, and 100%, respectively) produced by AI.
Wuzzit Hormel or Hormuz?
The four free detectors Cory Heidelberger mentioned, GPTZero, ZeroGPT, QuillBot’s detector, and HumanizeAI can sometimes identify obvious AI-written text, but they frequently disagree with one another and can produce both false positives and false negatives. – SCALE
The bigger issue is that these tools don’t actually know whether AI wrote something. They look for statistical patterns—predictability, sentence structure, word choices, and similar signals. Human writers can trigger those patterns, and AI can avoid them. – WIRED
As for Cory Heidelberger’s use of them: if he’s using them as a rough indicator, that’s reasonable. If he’s treating a detector result as definitive proof that a piece was written by AI, the research does not support that level of confidence. – SCALE
One amusing fact: over the years, AI detectors have incorrectly flagged parts of the U.S. Constitution, Shakespeare, and papers written before ChatGPT existed as “AI-generated.” That tells you a lot about their limitations. – REDDIT
I admittedly live a simple life. When I look at what AI can be used for right now, none of it really seems useful. Maybe that will change tomorrow, but not today.
Ben. Are you involved in scientific experiments? If not, you’ll not. Be very familiar with.
Cory likes to exaggerate but AI is a scientific tool. Using it to solve simple problems that GOOGLE could accomplish is just the entertainment in the SD “Bread & Circus” show. I haven’t even started to show off.
Prompt: In the style of Isaac Asimov examine and analyze Ben above.
@Cory: The four apps you listed, that detect AI, use AI to accomplish their detection.
Mr. Lansing, if you and Ms. Johnson are trying to promote the use of AI, you both need to try a different tactic.
In so far as AI can help scientists analyze data, awesome. Everyone else’s efforts seems to be the real bread and circus show. As others have pointed out, AI might be the new opiate of the masses.
Farm bankruptcies hit a six year high while diesel, fertilizer costs drive the farm crisis.
If Sioux Fall s wants to smell like Sioux City, go ahead.
Mr. Lansing pretends to be a short order cook who knows how to use Chat GPT, but really he’s a short order cook.
grudznick puts the “I” in artIfIcIal Intellegence. Mock grudznick now, or rue grudznick later.
Let’s get back to the headline: in her economic report, Monae Johnson got her facts wrong..
Hormel bought the Erion Packing Plant in Mitchell in 1946. That plant, located at 915 East Havens Avenue, became Dakota Pork when American Foods Group (same owners of the Yankton Cimpl’s plant!) bought it in 1987. Dakota Pork shut down in 2006, less than four years after promising a big expansion touted by Governor Janklow. The plant eventually became Performance Pet Products, canning dog food since at least 2015, when Farmers Union Industries purchased it. Google Maps shows Performance Pet Products signage out front of that address back to September 2009.
I welcome additional facts and corrections about Hormel’s presence in South Dakota. But Hormel hasn’t owned or operated, much less closed, a packing plant in South Dakota since 1987, which doesn’t strike me as “recent” in economic terms. Nor does Dakota Pork’s closure in 2006, especially not if we’re looking for examples of economic challenges and can find far more recent examples like the closure of Cimpl’s in Yankton last year, the closure of Molded Fiber Glass in Aberdeen in 2021, or the very recent slashing of the federal workforce in South Dakota.
Absent other information, it appears that we have a Secretary of State, an elected official whose job requires exacting attention to detail, opening an official report with a false claim, one easily checked with a little Googling or a call to the Mitchell Chamber of Commerce.
Whether AI, a staffer, or Secretary Johnson herself fabricated this claim is secondary.
The headline here is that the Secretary of State’s office doesn’t check its work and gets facts wrong. With a primary election Tuesday that the Secretary of State’s office will be managing and certifying, that sloppy work should sound alarm bells.