Illinois’ prominent Chicago Sun-Times newspaper has confirmed that a summer reading list, which included several recommendations for books that don’t exist, was created using artificial intelligence by a freelancer who worked with one of their content partners.
Social media posts began to circulate on Tuesday criticizing the paper for allegedly using the AI software ChatGPT to generate an article with book recommendations for the upcoming summer season called “Summer reading list for 2025”. As such chatbots are known to make up information, a phenomenon often referred to as “AI hallucination”, the article contains several fake titles attached to real authors.
“I went into my library’s database of Chicago area newspapers to confirm this isn’t fake, and it’s not,” a post on Bluesky by Book Riot editor Kelly Jensen says. “Why the hell are you using ChatGPT to make up book titles? You used to have a books staff. Absolutely no fact checking?”