This week in terrible things, The Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a third-party “best of” summer reading list where the majority of the books were invented. And invented badly. A freelancer confessed to using ChatGPT rather than doing his job. Further investigation into the syndicated supplement where the fake book list appeared uncovered more AI fakery, including articles mentioning websites and quoting from experts, neither of which exist.

It's hard enough to be a journalist without this bullshit. The Chicago Sun-Times scandal illustrates a few things: some people will stop at nothing, including the potential of shame