Good luck finding some of the highly recommended books on the Chicago Sun-Times list of summer reading … they don’t actually exist (yet):
Critics aren’t perfect.
Sometimes they get facts wrong. Sometimes their judgment is faulty. Sometimes they dangle their modifiers or split their infinitives with everybody watching.
I’ve been there. And it’s awkward.
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).
How is this happening?
We are now several years into the AI revolution. I’m constantly hearing about new, improved bots that are smarter than super-geniuses, and can replace lowly humans.
But the bizarre lapses are getting worse — and more dangerous.
AI is routinely making stupid, nonsensical mistakes that even the most incompetent employee would never make. I’ve met some incompetent journalists over the years, but none would make a boneheaded move of this magnitude.
And this is after a trillion dollars has been sunk into AI by the most powerful corporations in the world. This is after they have soaked up much of the energy grid. This is after all the training and vetting and upgrading.
We’re not talking about beta testing or first generation AI. Silicon Valley is actually bragging about this tech — but it’s stupider than the worst journalist in the country.
