Newspaper Writer Busted - Used AI to Create Summer Reading List - The Books Don't Exist

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NEW YORK (AP) — The recommended reading list contained some works of fiction. It also contained some works that were, in fact, actually fictional.

The content distributor King Features says it has fired a writer who used artificial intelligence to produce a story on summer reading suggestions that contained books that didn’t exist.

The list appeared in “Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer,” a special section distributed in Sunday’s Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer last week.

More than half of the books listed were fake, according to the piece’s author, Marco Buscaglia, who admitted to using AI for help in his research but didn’t double-check what it produced. “A really stupid error on my part,” Buscaglia wrote on his Facebook page.

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“The Heat Index summer supplement was created by a freelance contract creator who used AI in its story development without disclosing the use of AI,” the syndicators King Features said in a statement, noting it has a strict policy against using AI to create material. Only the Sun-Times and Inquirer have used the supplement, the organization said.

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