Untrue tales

There's an interesting article from NPR by Elizabeth Blair. It reminds me of a way a teacher I knew used to find out if her students actually read the books they claimed to have enjoyed. She would ask if, for example, Holden Caulfield learned a lot by spending a summer working as a mechanic in a beach town.

As soon as a student began sputtering, "That was a good way for Holden to learn about human nature, helping people get their cars running again..." she knew she could reel in another imposter.

And now we deal with fakery even worse than some high school Harry pretending to have read a book.  And some newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times and  The Philadelphia Inquirer fell for it, publishing a syndicated article with a summer reading list that lists made-up books by real authors. Horrible.

Readers are very familiar with the Chilean-American novelist Isabel Allende, but she never wrote "Tidewater Dreams," which this artificial-intelligence list called her "first climate fiction novel."

The 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to Percival Everett. But it's pure fiction to say that Everett wrote a book called "The Rainmakers," about a future town out West "where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity."

The list of summer reading holds 15 titles; five of them are real books. This reflects badly on the newspapers that fell for the deception perpetrated by King Features, a unit of the Hearst Newspapers, and on the list's writer Marco Buscaglia, whose journalism career should be over tonight. Replying to NPR's questions about it, he wrote, "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."

Reading a real book

Yeah, it's on you, buddy, and the shame is that this seems to be part of a trend in which real librarians and book reviewers are replaced by this insidious AI. I can't stand it. Artificial intelligence is no substitute for the real thing, and if this keeps up, how can anyone trust anything they read is real?

I hope someone will ask Buscaglia how this happened, and I hope that the next thing he writes will be a postcard from his new job detasseling corn in Kansas.