AI book list
Everett has taken the plunge with a cowboy-science-fiction romp!
Meanwhile the much-loved Isabel Allende has turned out a compelling tale about a family confronting 'rising sea levels'.
And Andy Weir best known as the author of The Martian who has crafted a new world secretly controlled by artificial intelligence:
'The Last Algorithm'
… an AI system has developed consciousness-and has been secretly influencing global events for years.
- Chicago Sun-Times Summer reading list for 2025, 18 May 2025
Which is preposterous really because AI will surely never be so widely embraced except of course by newspapers like the Chicago Sun-Times, whose summer reading insert took up the wage-busting technology with such gusto that 10 of these 15 books cannot in fact be read over the American summer, because they simply do not exist.
The list which also appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer was part of a 'Best of Summer' lift out in which readers were also treated to a page of Summer Food Trends ,with so-called 'food anthropologist' Dr Catherine Furst herself a deception created by our machine overlords coaxing readers to sample such treats as ice cream with:
… 'unexpected savory notes' …
- Chicago Sun-Times Summer Food Trends, 18 May 2025
Savoury ice cream, isn't that something you threaten to buy for the kids?
Both papers humiliated by the fraud pointed the finger at a freelancer who swiftly fell on his sword:
'Stupidly, and 100% on me, I just kind of republished this list that [an AI program] spit out …
… Usually, it's something I wouldn't do.'
- Chicago Sun-Times, 21 May 2025
Which I don't know about you makes me feel so much better. Of course this is just the latest in a rapidly growing list of AI cock ups.
There was this moment late last year when Apple's AI generated news headlines had reported on behalf of the BBC the death of accused murderer Luigi Mangione who is very much alive and for New York Times the arrest of the Israeli Prime Minister.
Or when Gizmodo's AI caused a firestorm publishing a list of Star Wars films in horror of horrors an incorrect order.
And then this episode when a Microsoft AI tool didn't quite appreciate the questions being asked it by a philosophy professor and issued him this charming warning:
'I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you … '
- Time, 17 Feb 2023
No, not much to worry about at all.
Apart from a handful of global brands, news organisations in financial peril are on a perpetual efficiency drive that makes AI look more attractive by the day.
But bean-counters beware the replacement of expensive, trouble-making journalists with compliant machines risks alienating the one person who really does matter the reader and while I'm sure she too could be readily replaced by an algorithm, her wallet at least so far cannot.
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