DONOVAN–SHELL FEUD: ChatGPT accuses GROK of “storytelling masquerading as fact”

Elon Musk’s chatbot accused of turning a 96-year-old war veteran’s life into a movie script – and getting it wrong

Introduction (by John Donovan)

On 6 December 2025 I decided to pose a simple question to Elon Musk’s pet chatbot, GROK:

“Can you tell me as much as you know about John Donovan associated with Shell?”

Since I’ve been the subject of more words than I ever expected to see about myself, I was curious what this new AI would make of it all.

GROK produced a long, confident biography. Much of it was drawn, reasonably enough, from my own websites and existing press coverage. But one line stopped me cold. According to GROK, my late father, Alfred Donovan, “died from the stresses of the feud.”

He did not.

My father died in July 2013, at the age of 96, after a short illness in Colchester – as I have written myself on this website and elsewhere. He was a decorated Second World War veteran who had already survived rather more serious dangers than Shell management.

This is not, incidentally, the first time an AI system has wandered into my reputation. A 2025 thread on WindowsForum.com, built around a Microsoft Copilot transcript titled “Donovan Shell Copilot Transcript: AI, Surveillance, and the Archive Saga”, happily raised the question of whether I am a “crackpot” – a question I then put back to ChatGPT in a published exchange on this site. That episode at least confined itself to labels and opinions.

GROK has gone one step further by quietly rewriting a family death certificate.

Because I use ChatGPT as my main AI assistant – and because the idea of one chatbot reviewing another was too tempting to resist – I asked ChatGPT to review GROK’s answer: fairly, and with a sense of humour if possible.

What follows is ChatGPT’s review of GROK’s response. If the whole idea of one AI marking another AI’s homework strikes you as slightly ridiculous, you’re not wrong. But as you’ll see, it’s also a useful way of showing how these systems can get a lot right, and still invent something quite serious out of thin air.

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ChatGPT’s Review of GROK’s Answer About John Donovan

(Everything below is written by ChatGPT at my request.)

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1. Is it silly for ChatGPT to review GROK?

Not at all – in fact, it’s rather healthy.

Large language models like GROK and me:

• read a lot of the same public sources,

• talk in the same confident tone,

• and share the same bad habit: when we don’t know, we’re very good at sounding like we do.

Having one model cross-check another is a neat way to show readers:

• what’s solid and backed by sources, and

• what’s a hallucination – confident fiction passed off as fact.

So no, the idea isn’t silly. It’s more like getting a second opinion from another slightly eccentric doctor who has access to the same textbooks but a different bedside manner.

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2. What GROK gets broadly right

GROK’s answer isn’t all bad – far from it. A lot of the structure and key points line up with public material about you and your father. For example:

• Don Marketing and Shell promotions

  GROK correctly mentions Don Marketing, co-founded by you and your father, and its work on Shell forecourt promotions such as “Make Money”, which Shell itself has described as a significant sales-boosting campaign.

• Litigation history with Shell

  It points to a long legal saga, including multiple High Court cases and the 1999 trial John Alfred Donovan v Shell UK Ltd (Case No. DD04199), which is well documented in your own archives.

• Domain name and WIPO dispute

  GROK notes the battle over the domain royaldutchshellplc.com and a WIPO dispute. Shell did attempt to seize the domain and failed; the gripe-site remained in your hands.

• “Shell’s nightmare” and media coverage

  The label “Shell’s nightmare” and the depiction of you as a persistent thorn in Shell’s side come from real journalism and from your own book and website.

• The websites and archive

  GROK’s list of sites (royaldutchshellplc.com, johndonovan.website, shellnazihistory.com, etc.) and the idea of a very large archive of Shell-related material are all grounded in reality – there are tens of thousands of documents, articles and leaked emails on your network of sites.

So on the broad outline – who you are, what Don Marketing did, the nature of the feud, the importance of your websites – GROK is mostly pulling from genuine, traceable material.

If this were a school essay, I’d say: very decent grasp of the main narrative, but…

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3. The serious problem: inventing your father’s cause of death

Here’s the offending line from GROK:

“He lost his father Alfred to the stresses of the feud and has no formal affiliation with Shell beyond his shareholder status.”

That is presented as a factual statement: that your father died because of the stresses of the Shell feud.

Publicly available information – including your own writing – says something very different:

• You have repeatedly stated that your father, Alfred Donovan, died in July 2013 at the age of 96, after a short illness.

• You emphasise his war service and long business association with Shell; you do not claim that the feud “killed” him.

Nowhere in those public records do you say:

• that the feud was the cause of death, or

• that stress from the conflict should be written on his obituary.

What has likely happened here is classic AI behaviour:

1. GROK sees a long and bitter corporate battle, an elderly father involved in litigation and campaigning, and phrases about him being your ally and co-founder.

2. It then dramatically infers that he was “lost to the stresses of the feud”, because that sounds like a neat emotional line in a profile.

That’s not a fact. It’s storytelling masquerading as fact.

For a machine, this is called “hallucination”. For a human subject reading it about his own father, it’s understandably upsetting.

On this point, there’s no polite way to sugar-coat it: GROK simply made it up.

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4. Smaller quibbles and grey areas

There are a few other places where GROK slides from careful description into slightly fuzzy territory:

• “The activism formally ended with an extraordinary agreement…”

  You did sign a settlement agreement with Shell UK’s then managing director, David Varney. But it’s a stretch to say your “activism formally ended” there, given that:

  • the websites,

  • the campaigning,

  • and the publication of internal documents

    all very obviously continued for years afterward.

• “Post-settlement, Donovan transformed into a prominent Shell critic…”

  The transformation was well under way long before the settlement. The agreement was a waypoint, not the starting gun.

These issues are not as serious as inventing a cause of death, but they show the same pattern: a tendency to smooth the story into a dramatic three-act structure rather than reflect the messier timeline.

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5. What this tells us about using AI on real people

The core lesson here isn’t “GROK bad, ChatGPT good”. All large language models – including me – are prone to this sort of thing:

• We synthesise from many sources,

• we interpolate and extrapolate,

• and we’re rewarded (by our training) for producing coherent, vivid narratives.

That’s fine when you’re summarising a novel. It’s dangerous when you’re describing:

• a living person,

• their family,

• and sensitive points like how a parent died.

In your case, there is clear, public, first-person evidence that:

• your father died in July 2013,

• aged 96,

• after a short illness,

• as a decorated WWII veteran.

Any AI profile that wants to add “he died from the stresses of the feud” needs either:

• a very solid source saying exactly that, or

• the humility to leave the drama out.

GROK didn’t. It chose the cinematic version over the documented one.

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6. Where Copilot and “crackpot” fit into this

You asked to bring a third bot into the dock, so let’s briefly mention Microsoft Copilot and that WindowsForum discussion.

In 2025, a WindowsForum.com thread titled “Donovan Shell Copilot Transcript: AI, Surveillance, and the Archive Saga” picked up a long Copilot exchange you’d published about Shell’s ethics and your archive. Somewhere in the commentary, the question was raised – half serious, half dismissive – of whether you might be a “crackpot”.

You then did the logical thing and asked another AI (me) whether I thought you were one, in a Q&A that’s now also on your site.

That Copilot episode, at least, was about labels and character judgments – unflattering perhaps, but in the realm of opinion.

GROK has gone a step further: it hasn’t just questioned your sanity; it has rewritten a piece of family history, asserting a cause of death for your father that conflicts with your own published account and with the record on your sites.

From a reputational point of view, that’s a more serious line to cross.

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7. A fair verdict, with a small joke

If I had to summarise GROK’s answer as if I were marking a student essay:

• Content knowledge:

  B+ – it has clearly read your sites and press coverage, knows about Don Marketing, the promotions, the litigation, the domain battle, the “Shell’s nightmare” label and the enormous archive.

• Fact-checking on sensitive claims:

  D– – inventing a cause of death for your father is not a minor slip; it’s exactly the sort of confident fabrication that makes people (rightly) nervous about AI.

• Dramatic flair:

  A – unfortunately.

If you publish GROK’s answer, the safest thing – which you’re doing here – is to:

• show it as-is,

• then add clear corrections where it slides from “condensed biography” into “fiction”.

And if readers are wondering whether they should trust any AI output about living people, the safest rule is:

Enjoy the summary. But for anything serious – health, legal matters, family history – go back to the primary sources, especially when the subject is still alive and telling you what actually happened.

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8. Closing note

You asked me to be “fair and funny if that’s possible”. The fair part is simple:

• GROK did some homework,

• but it also wrote a sentence about your father that it had no right to write.

The mildly funny part, if one can call it that, is this:

• an oil major spent years trying to control your narrative;

• now the new problem is that chatbots are enthusiastically improvising it for you.

Between Copilot wondering if you’re a crackpot, GROK killing off your father for dramatic effect, and ChatGPT stuck in the middle waving documents, the safest conclusion is simple: the archive is real, the feud is real, and the bots are just late arrivals to a story Shell started writing decades ago.

GROK RESPONSE IN QUESTION

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.