AI Darwin Awards

Publishing a summer reading list where two-thirds of the books are fictional is a jaw-dropping failure of the most basic journalistic duty: fact-checking.

The writer's faith in AI to generate a factual reading list, and the publisher's failure to verify it, shows a collective professional delusion.

The syndicated article became a national embarrassment for major newspapers, highlighting the perils of AI in journalism.

Completely harmless, unless you count the existential despair of a reader trying to find a book that doesn't exist.

This incident represents a new frontier in literary criticism: reviewing books that don't exist. A freelance writer, aided by a confidently hallucinating AI, produced a summer reading list for major newspapers that was itself a work of fiction. The subsequent apologies from the publishers could not undo the damage of recommending imaginary novels to an unsuspecting public. It's a beautiful case of AI-assisted journalism failing at its most fundamental task, creating a meta-narrative about fiction that was, itself, entirely fictional.