SO? JUST HAVE AI WRITE THE BOOKS: Chicago Sun-Times Published A.I.-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don’t Exist.
An AI-generated list of recommended reading for the summer, published by the Chicago Sun-Times, included several books that don’t exist.
Per NPR, at least one edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer used the same flawed list, titled “Summer reading list for 2025.” Suggested titles included “Tidewater Dreams,” purportedly authored by Chilean American novelist Isabel Allende, which was described as her “first climate fiction novel.” Allende is a real person, but the suggested novel is not a book she or anyone else published.
Another suggestion was “The Rainmakers,” which is described as a story set in a “near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity.” This faux novel was said to be written by 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner Percival Everett.
The outlet noted that only five of the 15 books suggested were real titles.
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Related: Politico’s Newsroom Is Starting a Legal Battle With Management Over AI.
Politico’s contract stipulates that the publication needs to use AI in a manner that follows the company’s standards of journalistic ethics. “We’re not against AI, but it should be held to the same ethical and style standards as our political journalists,” says Arianna Skibell, the union’s vice chair for contract enforcement, who writes Politico’s energy industry newsletter. Some union members question whether there’s always appropriate human oversight over the AI content Politico publishes.
In one case, an AI-generated live summary used language around immigration that human writers are not permitted to use, publishing phrases like “criminal migrants” as it covered the vice presidential debates.
“There were also factual errors that the AI inserted that night,” alleges Skibell. For example, she says, the AI credited actions taken by the Biden Administration as things Kamala Harris did. That post was later swapped for replacements without the errors, according to screenshots reviewed by WIRED. “At Politico, you can’t just wholly take down articles written by human reporters without going through a series of approvals, all the way up to newsroom leadership. That did not happen for the AI live summaries,” Wittenberg claims. (Politico did not comment on the specifics of the union’s allegations.)
Union members say they believe the AI-generated posts were handled in a way that violates Politico’s correction and takedown policies. They also allege that one of Politico’s paid premium AI tools for generating policy reports has spewed out incorrect information in the past. Politico’s human reporters broke the news in 2022 that the Supreme Court had voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, but a report on abortion rights generated by the Policy Intelligence Assistance tool in March 2025 was written as though the constitutional right was still in effect.
So AI is now covering events as well as human Politico journalists – that’s real progress!
Finally, an oldie but a goodie: DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: Politico illustrates story about race and the modern GOP with a picture of Democrat George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. Even more amusingly, it’s labeled “History Dept.”
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