What’s that? You haven’t read The Collector’s Piece by Taylor Jenkins Reid?! How could you have skipped Migrations by Maggie O’Farrell?! It’s one of the most important books of the decade! Honestly, if you haven’t read Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende, I don’t even want to talk to you.
Unfortunately, no one will ever be able to read these books, because none of them are real. The writers are, but the books are fake; just some AI-generated slop that somehow got published in the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
First reported by 404 Media, two-thirds of the 15-book summer reading list was fake. The list was a syndicated piece hastily slopped together by King Features, a subsidiary of publishing giant Hearst, and included no byline.
Freelance writer Marco Buscaglia later claimed responsibility, admitting the piece was partially generated by AI. “Huge mistake on my part,” he told NPR. “It’s on me 100 percent.”
This Summer Reading List? It’s Totally Fake.
What’s fun is that the fake books were paired with equally fake descriptions. Fake book The Last Algorithm by real author Andy Weir, the guy who wrote The Martian, is followed by a hilarious description: “Following his success with ‘The Martian’ and ‘Project Hail Mary,’ Weir delivers another science-driven thriller. This time, the story follows a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness and has been secretly influencing global events for years.”
Oh, the irony. It hurts. You’ll never get to Andy Weir’s latest novel unless someone asks AI chatbot to auto-generate the entire novel.
The Sun-Times newsroom quickly distanced itself from the disaster. A statement from the journalists’ union slammed the “slop syndication,” while the paper’s management promised to investigate how the AI-generated list made it into print.
While I can’t provide a definitive answer, I can take a wild guess that this might be the kind of disrespectful garbage churned out when a corporation lays off and buys out 20 percent of its staff and turns to artificial intelligence nonsense to fill in the gaps in its coverage.
Anyway, I’m heading to the local park, laying out a towel, and I’m going to crack open the Chicago Sun-Times-recommended novel Salt and Honey by Delia Owens just as soon as I tell ChatGPT to write it for me.
The post Newspaper’s Summer Reading List Was Filled With Fake, AI-Generated Books appeared first on VICE.
