<p>A widely circulated online quotation presents Arthur Schopenhauer as an early antinatalist who allegedly claimed that “if children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone,” humanity would choose not to reproduce. This article investigates the provenance, accuracy, and philosophical implications of that memic passage. What begins as a routine source check develops into a case for further methodological investigations into human–AI co-research. Initial consultation with generative AI produced a false negative—asserting that no such passage appears in Schopenhauer’s works—highlighting the fragility of AI-assisted textual retrieval, especially when nineteenth-century Fraktur sources and conceptually loaded expressions (“pure reason”) are involved. Guided by improved prompts and cross-verification, we trace the quote to Thomas Bailey Sanders’s selective 1890 translation of Parerga und Paralipomena, compare it with the German original, and show how translator choices reshape Schopenhauer’s counterfactual thought experiment into a normative antinatalist maxim. The original text, however, supports no such conclusion: for Schopenhauer, human reproduction arises from needs and desires, not from rational deliberation, and thus cannot ground a moral duty to cease procreation. Beyond clarifying Schopenhauer’s position, the paper illustrates both the epistemic risks and the research value of contemporary AI systems in philosophical scholarship.</p>