The Chicago Sun-Times Book List Wasn't an AI Mistake. It Was a Human One.

The AI didn't fail, the editors did. And ultimately, so did we.

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. 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 100% 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. (It’s fun, you should read it if you find a used copy somewhere.)

The Blame Game

Both the freelancer who put the piece together, Marco Buscaglia, and the Chicago Sun-Times have spent the last 48 hours furiously passing the buck over who was responsible for this cringy embarrassment. Buscaglia admits to using AI tools, but unconvincingly claimed he was just using them for research. Much like a 1960s teenage boy caught red-handed with his dad’s Playboy claiming he was just reading the Norman Mailer interview. The newspaper’s equally lame defense was that the insert the reading list appeared in was an advertorial that came from King Features, a subsidiary of the Hearst Corporation that mostly syndicates comic strips and puzzles. No one at the Sun-Times claimed responsibility for allowing it into the Sunday paper. It didn’t show up on newsstands by magic.

AI Isn’t At Fault

What I don’t blame is the AI itself. Artificial Intelligence doesn’t really exist and is better called by what it is, a Large Language Model (LLM). LLMs just observe patterns in data and lacks understanding and awareness. It doesn’t know who Taylor Jenkins Reid is. It doesn’t even really know what a novel is. It just generates words based on probabilities. I don’t blame the LLM any more than I would blame a puppy who peed on the carpet because nobody took it for a walk. The responsibility lies with the grown-ass people who chose to use an LLM for a task it was never designed for and can’t do, and then didn’t even look at the content it provided for the five seconds it would take to say, “Wait, Percival Everett already has a new book out? That doesn’t seem right...”

Somebody Should Have Caught This

The Sun-Times’ decision to publish this LLM-generated content (and yes, despite their deflections, it’s ultimately their responsibility) constitutes a major lapse in editorial judgment. You just cannot rely on LLMs to do this work without human supervision. But even above the editorial staff, the real responsibility lies with the people who created the circumstances under which the Sun-Times resorted to this blunder. It is no accident that this happened less than two months after their parent company, Chicago Public Media, laid off 23 journalists and editors in a mass layoff that reduced CPM’s total staff by 20 percent.

This Is On All Of Us

We can’t even blame corporate greed for this: Chicago Public Media is a not-for-profit company. (They also own the NPR mainstay WBEZ Radio, home of the weekly comedy news program Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, which by all rights should have a field day with this story next weekend.) The real issue here is the fact that American journalism has collapsed. Not just because of political pressure and threats, although obviously that’s not helping one little bit, but because we as a society have decided that journalism isn’t something we want to pay for. And that is becoming a doom spiral: an incident like this does nothing to make me want to restart my newspaper subscriptions.

Journalism Can’t Survive On Vibes

But when we complain about blunders like this, we have to remember that the reason why newspapers make these mistakes isn’t just because some bean counters decided that the shareholders’ dividends were more important than the fact-checking department. Those people made that decision in part because we collectively decided that the news was some headlines we might or might not scan over our morning coffee, and so there’s no money in journalism anymore. And frankly, in this cultural moment, I have no idea how to fix that.

I still love a summer reading list. And I still believe in the value of professional writers, editors, and fact-checkers who make it possible for the rest of us to trust what we read. LLMs can mimic a lot of things, but they can’t replace human judgment. If we want journalism to survive, let alone improve, we have to be willing to support it. Even when it stumbles like this.

And if you’re still looking for books to read this summer, pick up Paul Rudnick’s hilarious romantic comedy What Is Wrong With You?, Molly Jong-Fast’s amazing memoir How To Lose Your Mother about her relationship with her mother Erica Jong, and David Sheff’s biography of Yoko Ono, who is way more awesome than you might think.