WHAT THE ???

👀👉But I’ve never seen anything as embarrassing as the “Summer Reading List for 2025” in the Chicago Sun-Times.

It gave glowing reviews to books that don’t exist. And I bet you can guess why.

Yes, the newspaper relied on AI to write the article.

The article starts with a recommendation for Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende. This is Allende’s ”first climate fiction novel” where “magical realism meets environmental activism.”

It’s a shame that Allende never wrote this book. Nor did anyone else—the book simply doesn’t exist.

(I’ll predict, however, that an AI-generated book with this title will show up on Amazon within a few days. When you live in a world of AI hallucinations, this is how the business model plays out.)

The next book on the Sun-Times list is The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir. This novel is also non-existent. But the storyline—about rogue AI that gains consciousness—makes me think that the bots are now mocking us.

It doesn’t get better.  The first 10 books on the summer reading list are entirely hallucinated.

As the story of the fake reviews spread on social media, the Sun-Times got into damage control mode.  It issued a public statement denying responsibility.

But that just makes matters worse.

Why are they publishing garbage without vetting it? And the denial is also implausible.

Somebody at the newspaper must have given the okay to this. The printing presses don’t run themselves (although maybe that will be the next stage of the AI business model).

“...AI is wonderful, except for the fact that it’s destroying media, education, the environment, music, the arts, people’s thinking skills, and everybody’s job.”

 If AI really were—as is so often claimed—a great creative tool, you might anticipate that these visionary artists would be demand accelerated development of the tech. After all, these same musicians have readily embraced new tech in the past.

By Ted Gioia

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