Did the Chicago Sun-Times Use Artificial Intelligence to Create a Summer Reading List Filled With Fake Books?
As the weather warms up, your thoughts may turn to lazy summer days at the beach with a good book. Tina, the creator and co-host of the podcast Book Talk, Etc. , opened her Chicago Sun-Times on Monday to find the paper’s “2025 Summer Reading List.” If Tina were me, someone who’s not up-to-date on the latest literary news, the article might seem like a useful starting point for new book recommendations. But since Tina creates content exclusively about books, I imagine she’s acutely aware of which authors are writing which books — which is why she was able to immediately spot a number of books on the list that simply don’t exist.
Tina took a photo of the article and posted it to her Threads account, accusing the newspaper of using AI to generate recommendations. That image of the article is now circulating on Bluesky , as well as the Chicago subreddit . I’m not a subscriber, and the article doesn’t appear to be on the Sun-Times site, so I can’t verify the list myself. But the Sun-Times has since confirmed that the list is real .
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Of the 15 “books” on this summer reading list, only five are real books you can actually, you know, read: Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan; Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter; Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury; Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman; and Atonement by Ian McEwan. Coincidentally, those are the last five books on the list, and they’re not new. The other 10 are entirely made up, including such “hey, I’d love to read that” entries as The Last Algorithm , a new AI thriller from The Martian author Andy Weir; and Boiling Point , a smart-sounding tale of environmental ethics from critical darling Rebecca McKee. Alas.
Given that these fake books have real authors, fans of these authors can believe that their favorite writer has an intriguing new novel out. Even if you have no idea who any of the named authors are, you can use this part to head to the library or bookstore to get a jump on your summer reading list — and if you pick from the top 10 recommendations, you’ll be looking for a long time .
What happened here?
According to a report from the Sun-Times’ Bluesky, the article was not editorial content and was not approved or created by the editorial staff. The report did not say whether the content was AI-generated, but 404 Media spoke with the author , who admitted to using AI for this article, as well as others: “I sometimes use AI for background, but I always check the material first. I didn’t do that this time and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses.”
Even before we had this confirmation, it seemed like the paper had used generative AI to write this article. It’s not just because the writing is unnatural . AI often hallucinates , or, in other words, sometimes makes things up. It’s not entirely clear why models do this — it could be a problem with the training data or the inferences the models make from that training — but the problem is getting worse, even as AI models supposedly improve.
This is unavoidable even with the best tips: if you use generative AI, it will sometimes hallucinate, which means you need to check the output for inaccuracies (or outright lies). I understand that someone who doesn’t understand the technology will see what a program like ChatGPT can do and want to use it to generate articles like this, but as many writers and artists have been arguing for years, you can’t replace a human worker with an AI chatbot and expect the same quality of work. Sure, ChatGPT will happily generate you a list of 15 book recommendations in under a minute, but it’s entirely possible that some (if not most) of those recommendations will be garbage.
I don’t believe in using generative AI to publish stories like this. But if a newspaper is going to hand over the writing to a bot, it needs a human fact-checker (or maybe, I don’t know, an editor ) to go through the generation and make sure everything is correct. Although in that case, I’d suggest just paying a human writer to make book recommendations themselves. I guarantee you there are plenty of unemployed or underemployed journalists who would jump at the chance. While the Sun-Times seems to have such a human writer behind the AI, that work needs to happen with every generation. If not, you’ll get articles like this.
Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to give me a synopsis of Andy Weir’s The Last Algorithm . The bot searched the web for an answer and, to its credit, accurately reported that the book doesn’t actually exist. It made a few assumptions, saying that the Sun-Times definitely used AI to create the article (though I suppose a very lazy intern hoping to get fired might have also made up the books), likely because the social media posts it was gleaning from suggested that it did. But I also found its final thought to be particularly accurate (and accidentally conscious):
“This incident highlights the importance of verifying information, especially when it comes to content generated by artificial intelligence,” ChatGPT writes.