Subject: Now, This Is Spooky
Is what I am reading- Real? Or is it- Memorex?

Or is it complete, fictional bullshit?

A real life warning-

Sloppy work

This week, newspapers published a summer reading list filled with made-up titles—a glimpse of what happens when collapsing editorial standards collide with AI, and gutted newsrooms leave no one left to notice.


Lincoln Michel: Over the weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times—a storied and award-winning newspaper and longtime home of Roger Ebert—published a summer reading list. Almost all the books were fake. There is no Nightshade Market by Min Jin Lee, Boiling Point by Rebecca Makkai, The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, or The Rainmakers by Percival Everett, among other invented titles.

Parker Molloy: Of the fifteen books recommended in the list, a full ten of them are entirely made up.

Lincoln Michel: The article was not only generated by ChatGPT (or similar program), but clearly unedited. No one at the Chicago Sun-Times even bothered a cursory check. And not only the Sun-Times. The article, along with other seemingly AI-generated pieces, were syndicated in multiple newspapers across the country including the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Dan Epstein: I get that standards in the field have slipped across the board, but this is a goddamn disgrace.

Parker Molloy: Marco Buscaglia, who created the content, admitted that the list was AI-generated. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can't believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” Buscaglia told 404 Media. “On me 100 percent and I'm completely embarrassed.”

Stewart Mason: The newspaper’s equally lame defense was that the insert the reading list appeared in was an advertorial that came from King Features, a subsidiary of the Hearst Corporation that mostly syndicates comic strips and puzzles. No one at the Sun-Times claimed responsibility for allowing it into the Sunday paper.

Ted Gioia: Why are they publishing garbage without vetting it?

Parker Molloy: The most telling aspect of this story isn't the AI failure itself—we all know AI hallucinates facts—it’s the context in which it happened.

Teddy (T.M.) Brown: The Chicago Sun-Times list is much more about the impacts of media consolidation than artificial intelligence.

Stewart Mason: It is no accident that this happened less than two months after their parent company, Chicago Public Media, laid off 23 journalists and editors in a mass layoff that reduced CPM’s total staff by 20 percent.

Oliver Burkeman: I think people are just embarrassed to admit they haven’t read Allende’s “Tidewater Dreams.” I found it magisterial, a tour de force, a compelling meditation on the nature of memory and fiction itself.

Note on that final commen directly above…. Check out an interesting rabbithole by trying to find Allende’s “Tidewater Dreams”.

https://post.substack.com/p/i-...

In any event, the lesson emerges: not everything you read is real. Some of it may have been generated by AI.

And some (I would add)- by a Russian troll farm.


What political groups have been caught playing with AI?


What political groups have been caught publishing bullshit from Russian troll farms?

Be careful out there.