If you recently read a summer book roundup in the Chicago Sun-Times and found yourself intrigued by some of the titles, here’s some bad news: The piece was generated by artificial intelligence and most of the books on the list do not actually exist.
The newspaper printed the unbylined feature highlighting 15 books that “promise to deliver the perfect summer escape,” 404 Media reports. First on the list was Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende, called “a multigenerational saga set in a coastal town where magical realism meets environmental activism.”
That book is not real, and neither are The Collector’s Piece by Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Longest Day by Rumaan Alam, or The Rainmakers by Percival Everett. And science fiction author Andy Weir definitely did not write a book titled The Last Algorithm, about (wait for it) “a program that discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness—and has been secretly influencing global events for years.”
Not all the titles were fake. The list did include Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the latter not typically considered a beach read.
Marco Buscaglia said he was the “writer” behind the piece and told NPR, “Huge mistake on my part and has nothing to do with the Sun-Times. They trust that the content they purchase is accurate and I betrayed that trust. It’s on me 100 percent.” There is presently no evidence that his statement was written by AI.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
