This story is so wild. It started, as these things often do, with a list. A sunny-season tradition: the trusted newspaper summer reading list. But this year, one went viral for all the wrong reasons.
The Chicago Sun-Times published a feature recommending new books for summer 2025. Just five of the 15 titles were real. Ray Bradbury wrote Dandelion Wine, Jess Walter penned Beautiful Ruins and Françoise Sagan Bonjour Tristesse.
The rest? Pure fiction. Literally. Titles like Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende (which she never wrote) and The Rainmakers by Pulitzer-winner Percival Everett (also fake) were invented by AI and published as if they were real.
The backlash was immediate. Writers, readers, and librarians were stunned. It’s a cautionary tale for anyone using AI to generate editorial content without proper oversight, and a sign of how unchecked automation is quietly reshaping what we read.
The piece had no byline, but freelance writer Marco Buscaglia came forward, admitting he’d used AI to generate part of the list. The blurbs, complete with fabricated plots and author attributions, were published without editorial review. ‘Huge mistake on my part,’ he said. ‘The Sun-Times trusted the content they licensed, and I betrayed that trust. It’s on me 100 per cent.’
To be clear, the Sun-Times didn’t create the content; it was syndicated via King Features, a Hearst subsidiary. But by then, the damage was done. In a year when the paper had already accepted major staff buyouts, readers were furious that ‘AI slop,’ as one Reddit user called it, had replaced human expertise.
Book lovers weren’t just annoyed. They were angry. Kelly Jensen, a former librarian and Book Riot editor, nailed it on BlueSky: ‘This is the future of book recommendations when libraries are defunded and dismantled. Trained professionals are removed in exchange for this made-up, inaccurate garbage.’
Meanwhile, authors like Gabino Iglesisa, who is part of a class-action lawsuit to protect writers from AI scraping, pointed out the absurdity: ‘If people want to read these fake books so badly,’ he joked, ‘pay writers and we’ll write them.’
Because there’s something deeper at stake here, readers trust curated lists. They trust journalists and critics to guide them toward books worth their time. The fact that those recommendations could be generated by bots, without human judgment, editing, or context, cuts at the heart of that relationship.
Writers deserve better. Readers deserve better. Books deserve better. Fake book lists might be laughable, but the erosion of credibility is not. Trust is hard won and easily lost—and once it’s gone, it’s not AI that will fix it.
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