There's a reason the mention of AI, particularly in creative spaces, gets a bit of an eyeroll. Actually there's several. It's trained on stolen content for starters, robbing real artists and writers of credit and income. Furthermore, it's often just pretty bad, especially when it comes to factual articles. Language models like ChatGPT are known to hallucinate pretty badly, and this has led to real outlets like the Chicago Sun-Times printing a summer reading list full of fake books.
Several outlets have covered the story, such as Arstechnica and The Verge, and of course now I'm doing it here. It could be that we are somewhat motivated to point out when AI stuffs up in the writing space, considering people seem to want to keep giving our jobs to it. But it was 404, which is a paywalled publication, who found the origins of this fake list that made its way into a few publications.
The Chicago Sun-Times made a post on Bluesky, which rather passes the buck on the situation. "We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak," it reads, adding "It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously. More info will be provided soon."
The byline on the list belongs to a Marco Buscaglia, who 404 managed to track down. Initially Buscaglia admitted to using AI in their work, but clarified that they always check it for errors. “This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” he told 404. “On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed.”
This isn't unique. There were other similar articles found, without bylines, that had blatantly fabricated information with quotes from fake people. One about “Summer food trends” had expert quotes from a doctor that doesn't exist, as well as some that were never said by people who do. It's likely this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to published hallucinating AI content.
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