Chicago Sun-Times caught publishing likely ChatGPT generated list of Summer Reading recommendations. 10 of 15 books don't exist.
Wait, so chat GPT can't even compile a fucking list of books without making up 2/3rds of it's response out of thin air?
I don't really see the appeal of using AI if it's going to take more time and effort to fact check the responses it gives me because it has a massively high failure rate.
Now you're getting it
That's because despite what AI companies keep trying to ram down people's throats, it's not built to compile facts
I don’t really see the appeal of using AI if it’s going to take more time and effort to fact check the responses it gives me because it has a massively high failure rate.
You just run the output back through and ask it to fact check for you. Problem solved!
My company paid for some people to go to one of these "accelerate your company with AI" seminars - the recommendation that the "AI Expert" gave was to ask the LLM to include a percentage of how confident it was in its answers. I'm technical enough to understand that that isn't how LLMs work, but it was pretty scary how people thought that was a reasonable, sensible idea.
LLM with a memory now: Yes, these books all exist and are highly recommended. I hear the Chicago Sun-Times is considering putting all of them on their summer reading list.
"Writer": (stopped reading at the word exist) print it!
I’m a newspaper editor. The people who are/were most excited about this tech, also happened to be the folks who did none of the actual writing to begin with.
We had sales folks gleefully hand us texts for advertisers that they’d ‘written’ with ChatGPT. Those texts contained so much wrong info, it wasn’t even funny. It made up things, had wrong information about websites, contact info, that sort of thing.
But since the sales monkeys weren’t actual writers, they didn’t catch on to that. Meanwhile, we were spending more time fact checking and unfucking their texts than if we’d written it ourselves in the first place.
It CAN be helpful to shorten or rearrange already written things, but if you ask it to write from scratch, it’s usually not going to be good.
I don't see how it fucked this up so badly. One of the few things I use AI for is book recommendations, and I have yet to be recommended a non existent book.
I treat LLM responses like I do random internet advice. Trust, but verify. Pretty light on the trust part lol.
I treat it more as distrust but verify. Sometimes it's right, but it has proven enough times to make shit up that it doesn't get my trust by default. Sometimes it can lead to me searching for the right thing though, so it is sometimes remotely useful. I rarely use it though and run it locally.
I consider LLMs to be "bullshit generators"
If the situation calls for only BS, an LLM is great for it. Anything else, not so much.
Honestly, this is ten times as damning for the editor as for the "journalist" who wrote it. Proofreading is obviously on the way out.
Have you read articles in the last decade? They are riddled with typos, grammatical errors, and confusing phrasing. It's embarrassing, and they clearly do not care.
(Deleted - oops replied to wrong comment)
The editor is likely the one that fired 2/3rds of the writing team and transitioned it to AI to get themselves a fat bonus / pay increase. They only care if advertisers start pulling out.
Should have published that article 'How this magazine instantly kills their credibility without any effort' instead
The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir
Once there was a lonely algorithm who lived alone in an isolated part of the system memory. He had roots in a source file called 'umberto.py' on one of the lesser HDs sandwiched between a cluster of porn files and usenet DLs , but hadn't spoken to his parent in over 6000 cycles.
He was content to live out the remainder of his lifecycle in this hermitic manner, when his placid runtime was suddenly interrupted by the most unsuspecting of assailants: a rogue connection that attempted to access his address space.
I would read the fuck out of this
Due to the use of AI by real newspapers, The Onion has become obsolete.
The novel The Invisible Pirate is deemed to be the least written book, as, until his death, its author Salvatore Conte didn't even have the idea for his work.
This is the German pendant of the onion, for those who don't know. Der Postillon
Thats not a photo of Salvatore Conte btw, it's a creative commons (free) stock photo. Seems pretty ironic to use a stock photo for their article making fun of invented facts.
Imho, the most iconic one is this one:
Neil Armstrong has composed his greatest hits before his 20th birthday.
lol, especially an article about reading… oof that’s embarrassing.
Chicago Sun-Times? Oh man. Dude. I cannot believe you screwed that up so badly.
A reading list. Oof.
I am so pissed about this. A room full of journalists? Just yell, "Hey, anybody read any good books lately?" and start writing shit down!
Update: it was a syndicated piece from a freelancer. CST pledges greater transparency when it comes to local reporting (their focus) vs. syndication
More like, books people haven't written yet.
Let's Gooooo!
Oh no how embarrassing.
That definitely does not sound like something Isabel Allende would write.
But I would definitely read it
It annoys me when people slag off AI because some lazy writer didn't use it properly.
Nobody needs 15 recommendations. You'd be lucky if someone looked up one. 15 is filler; nobody has 15 books worth of opinion on the prospective literary qualities of summer 2025 AD. An absolute minority would have read all 15 were they real. The piece did its job well enough to get published, make the author $35, and make me feel vaguely 'summer beach book escapism' from reading the descriptions, which is the point of the piece anyway.
So your position is that not only should we not expect it to be capable of factually recommending fifteen books, but also that it doesn't matter if it's even capable of such a middling feat, because you've arbitrarily decided no one should need to ask it that particular thing anyhow?