Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times summer reading list? 10 of 15 books DO NOT EXIST

[thewayne]

*sigh*

Care to guess how it happened? The suggestions included "Tidewater Dreams" by Isabel Allende and "The Last Algorithm" by Andy Weir". The independent who put the list together used an AI and didn't check what it generated.

The Sun-Times went through some massive lay-offs recently as its finances are in not very good shape, and lost 20% of its readership. I'm sure this little reading list snafu will encourage people to reup their subscriptions. Or not.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/chicago-sun-times-prints-summer-reading-list-full-of-fake-books/

Comments

[devilc]

Crying Laughing.
Fuck his lazy ass

[thewayne]

Ain't that a beaut?

Weir has THREE books out - well, four, if you include the graphic novel Cheshire Crossing. Last Algorithm ain't one of them. Anyone with a decent knowledge of A-list authors would know that, clearly no knowledgeable human reviewed this list. It would have taken 5 minutes tops to bounce this list off of Amazon's web page.

[kaishin108]

I saw that book listed somewhere by Isabel Allende and I wondered! That is truly sad. We don’t need anymore fake news. :(

[arlie]

My bridge partner doesn't understand why I'm so negative about what's currently called "artificial intelligence," aka "predict next token chat bots"

[disneydream06]

WOW... to cutting your readership off. :o
Hugs, Jon

[silveradept]

It looks like the insert was meant for all kinds of newspapers that subscribed to the syndicate, and the Chicago Sun-Times happens to be the one where it was noticed first. Still, we're definitely getting to the point where either workloads are too much, salaries too low, or ambition too small for people in an awful lot of places such that using the glorified autocomplete is going to increase and fact-checking it won't. We'll keep catching the obvious slop, but I wonder how much of the subtle slop we'll be able to spot.

[gingeriana]

If the whole bunch of people gets fired after this -- their lazy asses truly deserve it.

[thewayne]

And Altman thinks we're on the verge of Artificial General Intelligence.

[thewayne]

Yeah, that's the problem: the subtle hallucinations.