A US trad-print newspaper printed an AI-invented Summer Reading List filled with real authors and fake books. The Chicago Sun Times Sunday Supplement for May 18 included an advertorial summer reading list with ten invented books attributed to real authors.
You can read the full article on Ars Technica, and more across social media.
Following the paper’s acquisition and subsequent layoffs of many staff writers, it seems a freelancer from a content syndication partner forgot to fact check (or write an original) filler article for the supplement. An AI-generated article containing multiple AI confabulations went to print with hilarious – and not so hilarious – consequences.
Needless to say, the authors aren’t happy, subscribers aren’t happy and the advertisers aren’t happy. Nor are the remaining staff at the paper itself. The reputational damage to the paper has yet to be measured.
It’s a frivolous example; it isn’t the first and it won’t be the last. Perhaps the authors should get AI to write those confabulated books for them, they could be onto a winner?
Welcome to your AI-confabulated future.
AI isn’t artificial or intelligent. It’s a big word re-arranger with no concept of context. It doesn’t ‘think’ it just crunches whatever data its fed, rearranges it and fills in the gaps with some algorithmically programmed code that guesses what should be there based on previous patterns. It doesn’t know the difference between facts and garbage because it isn’t trained to check facts against anything else.
And the prompt obviously didn’t contain the clause ‘only include books for release between x and y date.’ Probably because that model isn’t connected to live data, only a frozen training set. So it made s*** up.
…And the freelancer didn’t check it. Don’t blame the AI it’s our own laziness and stupidity that’ll end the species.
Welcome to our new robot overlords.
🙂
AI: Artificial Incompetence.
Who needs it when there’s so much genunine incomptence times nine billion people.