Summer Reading List - “Literary Fiction About Fiction”
Nominee: Marco Buscaglia (Freelance Writer) and King Features/Hearst Media Company for publishing book recommendations for novels that exist only in AI imagination.
Reported by: 404 Media and subsequently Herb Scribner, The Washington Post - May 20, 2025.
The Innovation
Freelance writer Marco Buscaglia discovered the perfect efficiency hack for creating summer reading recommendations: instead of the tedious work of calling bookstores or checking Goodreads, he could simply ask AI chatbots to generate a curated list. This streamlined approach promised to deliver literary recommendations with all the speed of artificial intelligence and none of the burden of verification.
The Catastrophe
The resulting “Heat Index” special section, syndicated by King Features to the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, featured a literary festival of fictional works. Of 15 book recommendations, only 5 were real. The AI had confidently invented titles like “Tidewater Dreams” by Isabel Allende and “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir, along with imaginary works by Brit Bennett, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Min Jin Lee, and Rebecca Makkai.
The Aftermath
The fabrication was discovered by eagle-eyed readers on social media who noticed the non-existent books and impossible-to-verify expert quotes throughout the section. Both newspapers issued apologies, with the Philadelphia Inquirer calling it “a violation of our own internal policies and a serious breach.”
Why They're Nominated
This incident represents a masterclass in AI-assisted journalism failure: a writer who trusted AI completely, editors who verified nothing, and major newspapers that published book recommendations for novels that exist only in the fevered imagination of large language models.
Sources: The Washington Post: Major newspapers ran a summer reading list. AI made up book titles. | 404 Media: Chicago Sun-Times prints AI-generated summer reading list with books that don't exist.