Whoops! The Books are Fake

 
 
Would you like to read some of the interesting books suggested by Chicago Sun-Times for your summer vacation? Well, it's most likely you can't.

That's because only 5 of the 15 suggestions are actual books! The rest are the hallucinations of whatever AI chatbot the editors prompted to produce the list. The authors are real. But the books are not. One of the fabrications, by the way, is titled, "The Last Algorithm." Just a little bonus irony!

Apparently the newspaper was sold in a buyout agreement that involved firing 20% of the staff. The current hotness in the world of CEOs is the belief that the moment has come when they can shed a lot of white-collar workers and replace them with "nearly-free" AI LLM chatbots, just as years earlier they fired blue-collar workers and replaced them with robots.

AI tools are remarkable--don't get me wrong--but they are also unreliable, because AIs lack both judgment and understanding of what they're doing. Chatbots sound authoritative and knowledgeable, but remember that they're just the world's most elaborate autocomplete devices. They need constant supervision and fact-checking, because they just make stuff up that fits the patterns in the giant mass of data they've scraped.

(Oh, and they're only "free" or "cheap" if you don't consider the massive costs--financially and environmentally--of running gigantic data processing centers. Like all tech products being introduced today, AIs are now offered to users at a bargain basement price, to get everyone hooked, before the process of enshittification is initiated, and the costs are pushed onto the consumer for a less helpful tool, while the company slurps your data to sell and pushes ads at you. Just wait for a future where we can wait out environmental disasters in the company of a chattering AI whose outputs are festooned with product placements and political propaganda--yay!)

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