Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books
This is peak laziness. It seems that the reading list's author used autoplag to extrude the entire 60 page supplemental insert. The author also super-promises this has never happened before.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/chicago-sun-times-prints-summer-reading-list-full-of-fake-books/Open linkView original on awful.systems
As all the book authors on the list were apparently real, I guess the "author" of this supplemental insert remembered to google their names and to remove all references to fake books from fake authors made up by AI, but couldn't be bothered to do the same with the book titles (too much work for too little money, I suppose?). And for an author to actually read these books before putting them on a list is probably too much to ask for...
It's also funny how some people seem to justify this by saying that the article is just “filler material” around ads. I don't know, but I believe most people don't buy printed newspapers in order to read nonsensical “filler material” garnished with advertising. The use of AI is a big problem in this case, but not the only one.
Several people should be fired for this.
The Sun-Times staff has already been downsized, seems plausible that the layoffs could have contributed to publishing the article by mistake. https://www.wbez.org/business/2025/03/18/chicago-sun-times-lose-20-staff-buyout-offer
It's soooo bad. Could it be a cry for help?
No, the guy who did it non-apologized, by going he should have checked the output better. Still an AI user.
No, they are hallucinations or bullshit. I won’t accept any other terms.
If it makes you feel better, I've heard good folks like Emily Bender of Stochastic Parrots fame suggest confabulation is a better term. "Hallucination" implies that LLMs have qualia and are accidentally sprinkling falsehoods over a true story. Confabulation better illustrates that it's producing a bullshit milkshake from its training data that can only be correct accidentally.
You’ve swayed me. I’m now down with all three. Thanks for the explaination.
Ahem....
Cough cough
BWAHAHAHAHaaAaaaa