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The Sun-Times book list wasn’t an AI mistake. It was a human one.
The AI didn’t fail. The editors did.
I love a summer reading list. When I was a kid, the first two things I did on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend was get my season pass to the swimming pool at Clark Centennial Park (it was free if you had all As and Bs on your last report card) and check out a foot-high stack of books from the St. Vrain Valley Public Library. Today, my day job is writing and editing book reviews, and I invariably have at least three or four books sitting in various points around my house waiting for me to pick them up.
So I’m the target market for the list the Chicago Sun-Times published last weekend. There are things on there I cannot wait to read. Like Tidewater Dreams, a magic-realist novel about environmental activism by Isabel Allende. Or The Collector’s Piece by Taylor Jenkins Reid. A new near-future satire by Percival Everett? I’m in.
Only problem is, none of those books exist. 10 of the 15 books on the Chicago Sun-Times’ list are titles and synopses hallucinated by ChatGPT or a similar AI agent and attributed to real authors. Bizarrely, the other five are a seemingly random selection that inexplicably includes Bonjour Tristesse, a 1954 novel written by 18-year-old Françoise Sagan that reads like Sally Rooney on the black-and-white French Riviera…
