The Volokh Conspiracy

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AI-Hallucinated "Summer Reading List" in Hearst-Supplied Insert Published by Chicago Sun Times and Philadelphia Inquirer

|The Volokh Conspiracy |


Axios (Justin Kaufmann & Scott Rosenberg) reports:

The Sun-Times is feeling the heat after it printed a summer reading list Sunday, citing multiple non-existent titles by real authors — which was partially produced by AI….

The list begins with a nonexistent "novel by the 'beloved Chilean American author' Isabel Allende titled 'Tidewater Dreams,'" "ostensibly a 'climate fiction novel' that explores how one family confronts rising seas levels while uncovering long-buried secrets.'" (NPR [Elizabeth Blair] notes that "Only five of the 15 titles on the list are real.") Axios adds that "The insert also appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer," and

The Sun-Times says it licensed the content from King Features, a unit of Hearst, which claims to be the world's largest lifestyle publisher.

As a large language model, I can't feel vicarious embarrassment, but this seems unfortunate for all involved.

Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. Naturally, his posts here (like the opinions of the other bloggers) are his own, and not endorsed by any institution.