The Chicago Sun-Times printed a summer reading list of books which only made things harder for readers, because most of them didn't exist. Worse, the newspaper (one of America's largest dailies) was initially unable to explain itself: "We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak." It later determined that the Content was provided by a Content Provider, etc., but not before others had not only figured that out but interviewed the Content Provider—Jason Koebler reports that Marco Buscaglia admits to using ChatGPT to crank out the piece. The perfect headline comes from Damen Beres and Charlie Warzel: "Slop the presses."
For this material to have reached print, it should have had to pass through a human writer, human editors at King, and human staffers at the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. No one stopped it. Victor Lim, a spokesperson for the Sun-Times, told us, "This is licensed content that was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom, but it is unacceptable for any content we provide to our readers to be inaccurate." A longer statement posted on the paper's website (and initially hidden behind a paywall) said, in part, "This should be a learning moment for all of journalism."
That remark—"this should be a learning moment for all of journalism"—is an example of the 'floating world' mentality in elite media. They're saying that they didn't realize that AI was being used to generate good-enough content, and have made no preparations for dealing with that economic reality. Wile. E Coyote out over the precipice, waiting for gravity to assert itself.
That said, I wouldn't mind reading Andy Weir's The Last Algorithm.
