404 Books Not Found!

Search the internet for almost any book on the Chicago Sun-Times or The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Summer Reading List for 2025, and you’ll get a big sad 404 page not found. Why? Because only ten of the fifteen titles even exist. Yes, only ten. There will be no book titled The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir or Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. 

And insanely enough, this 64-page insert, complete with bogus summaries, wasn’t created by satire sites like The Babylon Bee or The Onion but by Marco Buscaglia. Well, it wasn’t exactly written by him either. Only after the article was published, somehow making its way past the “writer”, the fact checkers, the editor or editors, and layout specialist for multiple national newspapers, was it revealed that AI had created the entire list. And this wasn’t a list of unknowns either. These are authors with sizeable bibliographies, large followings, or even a Pulitzer Prize. If it wasn’t for the dedicated followers of these major authors, we may not have known about this so quickly or maybe even at all. ​

Buscaglia later admitted that his articles are AI-generated, but he “normally checks these things” giving the impression or understanding that ALL of his articles have been AI-generated. Now, this particular instance is laughable. To be fair, it’s just books, but the implications, not so much. I mean, AI gets things wrong. Ask Google any question, and the AI Overview clearly states that its response may include errors. 

Open ChatGPT, and it also warns you that it makes mistakes and prompts you to check the provided information. Why? Well, despite its name boasting its intelligence, it’s not that intelligent. It scours the World Wide Web or its own internal database for information, information that we humans provide. It’s only as good as it’s trained to be. But what does this mean for other news outlets or the articles that have been published? I have my theory, but I think that’s for you all to decide on your own.