We’re Losing The Battle Over What’s Real and What’s Not

The Chicago Sun-Times is going to go through some things. Is AI the culprit? Business model? Lack of editorial oversight? The answer doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things when it comes to the struggle to understand what’s real and what’s not.

The paper published a summer activities guide called the Chicago Sun-Times Heat Index that contained a reading list of books that included real authors, but some of the titles were entirely fictional. As in not real titles at all. Just made up. Five of the titles actually exist. Ten do not.

This episode lead most to immediately speculate that the article was generated by Artificial Intelligence and that there was no editorial oversight of what actually made it into print. I don’t know about you, but I’d call those assumptions more than an early warning sign.

According to 404 Media the Heat Index was published by King Features which is owned by Hearst Newspapers. The guide was licensed by the Sun-Times apparently for the Sunday print and online editions.

The Sun-Times issued an early statement saying they are looking into the matter as referenced below, promising more info to be released soon.

To their credit they did. VP of marketing and communications for Chicago Public Media, which owns the Sun-Times stated to 404 Media that no one at Chicago Public Media reviewed the section, which follows a pattern used with similar such inserts saying that “historically, we don’t have editorial review…because it comes from a newspaper.” That statement of course includes the promise of a change in policy going forward and an investigation to see if there is other inaccurate information. You can read the full Chicago Sun-Times statement released later here.

The Sun-Times was not the only paper to license and publish the paper according to NPR.

That NPR report also says that writer Marco Buscaglia claimed responsibility for the guide and did acknowledge that it was partly generated by Artificial Intelligence.

Ah, well. All of those worst case assumptions were not a mass hallucination, I guess.

There were years that I bought both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune every morning and got to work early enough to read them both. Those days are long gone, mostly thanks to the Internet and the changes that wrought on the newspaper publishing industry. We’ve all seen this next chapter coming. I guess it’s here.

Here’s the thing. The cold hard fact that most leapt to the assumption that this is some form of AI generated content proves the battle, and perhaps the war has already been lost, regardless of how this did or didn’t happen. It will happen again.

We’ve been heading into the land of make believe where facts don’t matter for some time now. It’s sad that what once were venerated media sources have been helping to lead the charge, especially in an era when governments feel free to make up things as they go along.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.