The Chicago Sun-Times ran a “summer reading list” containing the titles and descriptions of 15 books. Five were older books like Ray Bradbury’s 1957 classic Dandelion Wine. The other ten books had well-known authors, and colorful titles and descriptions. Just one problem: the books didn’t exist.
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Apparently the article’s “author” used AI to generate the list. Presumably the article passed through multiple levels of editing, and no one noticed. The Sun-Times has issued an apology.
The titles and descriptions all sound vaguely plausible. For instance, “The Rainmakers,” supposedly by Percival Everett, promises: “Everett’s satirical genius turns to a near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity, following a ‘precipitation broker’ who begins questioning the ethics of his profession.” If Everett actually wrote that, I would totally read it. Because Everett would have a devious and unexpected plot, characters I actually cared about, and shattering insights on racism and history.
But what we’re calling “artificial intelligence” is just the predictive text from your phone in a fancier format. It can create a plausible-sounding sentence or paragraph. You’d think people would have figured out by now that it has no understanding of meaning. There have been cases where lawyers cited nonexistent legal precedents because they used a chatbot to do research.
Naturally, The Onion promptly responded with its own list. But because a human wrote their list of non-books, they’re actually entertaining (”I Need Money” by Malcom Gladwell).
As an author who would do ridiculous things to get a sliver of attention for my books, I find it especially galling that the person bylining the Sun-Times article got author credit when they couldn’t be bothered to do any actual writing. I’ll let author Bree Bridges (one-half of the duo that writes as Kit Rocha) have the last word here:
[E]ven if every last one of these were real books, imagine thinking there was value in a list compiled by someone so unfamiliar with the books they don't immediately know whether or not they exist.
[Y]ou could have paid someone who, idk, READS BOOKS to compile a list of BOOKS they ENJOYED READING?
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