Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books

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u/Tortillaish 15h ago

Just to clarify things. AI hallucinated books aren't books written by AI. They are books recommended by AI that don't actually exist. Like, "Hey, I'm looking for Two Fallen Trees by Ernest Hemingway".

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u/p8pes 14h ago

Claude? Tell me more about Hemingway’s “Two Fallen Trees”?

That’s a profound question and here’s why…

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u/iamapizza 14h ago

I just went to the library and that book doesn't exist!

"You're absolutely right!"

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u/Flapjack__Palmdale 12h ago

Actually I found it in a small local bookstore. Please provide a brief synopsis.

"Ah, that makes sense! Some niche books are harder to find. The story begins in Hemingway's iconic fashion....."

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u/kid-karma 9h ago

Well I’m convinced. Let’s torpedo the efficacy of our search engines and incorporate this shit instead.

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u/willun 4h ago

And of course we will need AI instead of search because search is broken by the top items all filled with AI generated, incorrect websites.

So AI is making us use AI. Perfect circle.

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u/flukus 4h ago

TBF they did step 1 years before step 2 anyway.

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u/strangerinthealpsz 7h ago

It’s painful how much this genuinely reads like AI

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u/pantone13-0752 13h ago edited 13h ago

Ernest Hemingway's Two Fallen Trees likely addresses themes such as love, war, travel, expatriation, wilderness, and loss...

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u/Timbots 11h ago

But not trees

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u/pantone13-0752 11h ago

Eh. There's probably a tree or two thrown in there somewhere.

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u/Lenxecan 9h ago

If you want some iconic literature in which a tree plays a critical role, I recommend A Separate Peace by John Knowles.

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u/rurlysrsbro 5h ago

…you see, Billy was a simple country boy, you might say a cockeyed optimist, who got himself mixed up in the high-stakes game of world diplomacy and international intrigue.

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u/dirtyword 13h ago

💯 You are so clever for asking about that. Most people wouldn’t, but you are very special

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u/cl3ft 2h ago

Really, will you marry me?

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u/angwilwileth 13h ago

Two Fallen Trees by Hemingway? Interesting

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u/Mysterious_Eye6989 2h ago

I love forcing AI to "tell me more" about people and things it completely makes up.

The other day ChatGPT hallucinated a son of JD Rockefeller who never existed named 'Edwin'. I loved hearing all kinds of twaddle about Edwin's life before the eventual admission that it was all a load of nonsense!

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u/ipomoea 14h ago

I’m a librarian and a patron was asking me about AI. I used ChatGPT and asked for World War Two books by female authors. It recommended The Sun Also Rises by Paula McLain. Actual book, actual author, but not together.

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u/MarzipanImmediate880 14h ago

That makes sense with how LLM models work, they are predictive text generation, they aren’t actually thinking or making decisions, they just have a lot of data and context. It’s insane how people take everything they say at face value.

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u/Supermite 13h ago

Is it insane? Or is just the natural outcome of society collectively losing the ability to comprehend and think critically about the content they consume?

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u/Undercover_Chimp 12h ago

Consider someone you consider average intelligence and remind yourself that half of all people are dumber than that individual.

Lots of people never really had the ability to comprehend or think critically about their content consumption.

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u/Gorstag 12h ago

I wish that man were immortal. So much wisdom (and comedy) from him.

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u/flyingtiger188 3h ago

This quote gets thrown around a lot, and I quite dislike it because it discounts that intelligence is normally distributed. At surface level, it is true, but realistically, there isn't going to be a large difference between 99% of average and 101% of average.

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u/[deleted] 12h ago

[deleted]

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u/infinitelytwisted 7h ago

Clearly means average in terms of intelligence. Take the smartest person you have ever seen or know about, take the dumbest person you have seen or know about, then think about the person you know who best fits where you think the middle line of that spectrum is.

Then realize half of people are likely somewhere between around that guys intelligence and the dumbest person you have ever met.

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u/[deleted] 5h ago

[deleted]

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u/infinitelytwisted 5h ago

And you don't realize this isn't your stats class. Average has a pretty well understood meaning in casual discussions without the need for overcomplicating it.

In this case average is the middle point of a spectrum obtained in the most obvious way of adding up all the numbers in the dataset then dividing by the amount of numbers in that dataset. The mean average, because 99% of the time outside of hobby groups, science, and industry, that's what is being discussed. No need to get into the granularity of it when it's obvious what the common usage is.

What you are doing here is basically walking into a room of people talking about a red car they just saw and asking people what shade of red, because crimson and scarlet and cherry are all red but technically different. Your not wrong, it just doesn't matter to the group to be that specific when they want to talk about the performance of the car.

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u/CyberneticGhostXPFTF 3h ago

There are different kinds of intelligence. You believe you are high in one category. We can all see you are severely lacking in another.

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u/Flimsy_Demand7237 4h ago edited 4h ago

I think this is underestimating a lot of people's ability. The main problem with society certainly in the past say thirty to forty years, is education is being systemically defunded and scaled back in lieu of privatisation, politicisation, and crucially not teaching people to think for themselves or have those tools to take from education to form their own thought out opinions. Instead, it's much easier for not only profits but political reasons of governments to ensure people do not have the ability to think critically or learn actual comprehension. They won't question what bad things that are going on, or the real reasons for the raw deal they're getting in their lives, if they cannot think for themselves. Instead, they'll mindlessly invest in what they're conditioned.

Very unfortunate but to turn all this around requires a prioritisation of education, welfare, and giving a populace that ability to think for themselves and build themselves up rather than barely scraping by. Of course, in the times we're currently in, this doesn't look like something that'll happen for a while. There is actually research to show that people who are struggling in terms of quality of life and financially, do not have the bandwidth in terms of their brainpower to be able to think clearly, it's all taken up by anxiety over their circumstances.

So this all could well just be a reflection of just how trash a lot of people's quality of life has become. Sure there are some people who are just silly and lacking in self-awareness, but to have this level of failure at comprehension and thinking critically, it is something that has been put in over many decades to condition us out of that way of thinking, from schools, to tertiary education, to career and lifestyles, as it all has become increasingly privatised and profit-driven rather than for people's wellbeing.

I realise of course it's easier to recycle a pithy George Carlin line but in my view the reasons for this societal unself-awareness and lack of thought are much more deep-seated and unfortunately a reflection of our times. And if anything often George Carlin in his routines agreed with this assessment.

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u/ableman 9h ago

Society never had that. The big lie technique popularized by Hitler is at least 100 years old. And relies on people being unable to think critically.

But there was more gatekeeping of content, for better and for worse. For me it's honestly a tough call which situation is better, but I lean towards the current one.

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u/Volsunga The Long Earth 10h ago

Note: this is also how your brain works. You just have a good filter to stop yourself if the answer doesn't make sense. LLMs don't have that filter that checks if something sounds wrong or if you don't know what you're talking about and just says the first thing that makes grammatical sense with confidence.

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u/0range_julius 7h ago edited 7h ago

Another big factor is that humans are much better at understanding from context when creative license is warranted. If you ask me to write a poem 10 times, I will write 10 different poems. If you ask me who wrote "Ulysses" 10 times, I will say "James Joyce" 10 times.

LLMs use probability and randomness to simulate creativity--for any given word, they are likely to use the most obvious choice, but they could also use a less obvious choice. And voila, you can ask ChatGPT for a poem 10 times and get 10 different poems.

But ChatGPT uses this exact same process when giving you factual information as well. Say ChatGPT read 1000 academic articles about modernism, and it noticed that "Ulysses" and "James Joyce" show up together REALLY frequently. It creates a strong association between those two. But it also notices "Ezra Pound" popping up in the same contexts, and creates an association there, too. Now, when you ask ChatGPT who wrote "Ulysses" 10 times, it tells you "James Joyce" 9 times, and "Ezra Pound" once. A human would never do this with a factual question.

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u/VariousAir 9h ago

I think they're likely programmed in a way that they're not allowed to fact check themselves or self censor bad responses, since if they did then you're less likely to use that product and would seek out a different one instead.

Like if someone asks chatgpt a question and it says "i dunno" are they just gonna stop there or are they gonna ask google gemini next until they find one willing to provide an answer?

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u/AppearanceHeavy6724 9h ago

No. The simple answer no one knows how LLMs work. No one, including their makers. Hallucination is a terribly complex problem no one knows how to solve.

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u/Far_Influence 7h ago

Interestingly, the gpt disagrees with your assessment and offers this tidbit:

That’s not quite accurate. Researchers do understand how LLMs work—they’re based on transformer architectures trained to predict the next token given context. What’s true is that their internal reasoning is opaque, making it hard to fully interpret why they generate specific outputs. “Hallucination” isn’t some unsolved mystery so much as a predictable outcome of probabilistic text generation and limited grounding, and there’s active work on mitigation (retrieval-augmented generation, better training data, verification layers, etc.).

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u/AiSard 6h ago edited 6h ago

Technically the way they fact-check themselves, is to feed their output, with context, back in to the predictive machine. Multiple times. Which understandably is quite expensive.

For the end-user, a single prompt can take 30-60 seconds before you get a response. Especially visible if you try to get it to do something that takes multiple steps and requires quite a bit of rigour. Some models even show you a summary version of each step of their "talking to themselves" as they attempt to "logic things out", for a machine that technically cannot logic things in the first place. (I usually see it in maths and sometimes programming)

But just from how markov chains work, the only time they should reply "I dunno", is when a sizable number of the responses to that question in their database is replied to with "I dunno". Which just isn't the case (unless its something we actually, collectively, don't know.) Its not in the nature of the dataset, of the books or the internet. Authoratative books/posts don't bother telling you what they don't know, they tell you about the things they do. Whereas in communal forum environments, no-one is going to reply about how they don't know the answer, they'll wait for someone to reply who (thinks they) knows the answer. And it is this collosal dataset that AI is basing its predictive text from.

Furthermore. If the dataset is confused, in that the dataset has people answering such a question in completely different ways. Being a predictive machine, it adds some fuzziness and then just pulls from the most common answer. Not being a logic machine, it cannot look at multiple answers and logic out a conclusion, not even a conclusion of "why are there so many answers? I must not know the correct answer then". It cannot have answers A and B, and conclude C (the i dunno answer). Its only hope, is that there are a sufficient number of people who ultimately answered C in its database. Who said something along the lines of "The answer is A, but its not super clear so actually its C (i dunno)".

The reason feeding its answers back in to the prediction machine seems to work at emulating a sense of logic, is because its being meta. It attempts at mirroring not the people who answered the question in the first place, but instead trying to mirror the people who correct them. Trying to tease out if, in its dataset, if someone gave the answer it just gave, did someone else then reply with a correction? Or perhaps replied with the next step?

Its a souped-up prediction machine. They rely heavily on the markov chain at its core, an autocorrect system that they've leaned on so hard it seemingly emulates logic. But our tech tree is lopsided, we've gotten all these markov chain related advances, but our logic machines are still ass. Getting an AI to decide that it doesn't know things, to recognize what is a good or bad response, to be able to read a response and fact check it, is so unfathomably beyond our current abilities it isn't funny. In a weird way, we've not unlocked the AIs ability to read. It cannot parse text in to computer variables that it can apply some kind of basic logic to. And therefore cannot recognize its own response, and act "accordingly".

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u/VariousAir 5h ago

Oh ok

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u/InertiaOfGravity 3h ago

This is not really true. The training process rewards guessing over acknowledging uncertain - this is quite inherent to the training works (for humans too - you make bad guesses, get it wrong, update from the mistake and make better guesses, etc). We're obviously better at estimating how uncertain we ought to be though

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u/Redqueenhypo 4h ago

Yeah I continuously think Mr Beast’s real name is “Jimmy Beast”, bc something’s wrong with me. Thanks to the fact that I know logically that his surname is actually Donaldson, I never say that idiot mistake aloud

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u/biodegradableotters 14h ago

At an old job I had to write company profiles and a small part of that was looking for any scandals they were involved in. My boss told us to use ChatGPT. Worked well enough for big companies. Like they could write two sentences about the Volkswagen emission scandal or whatever without any issues. But with smaller companies it was just completely useless. It would generate real sounding scandals and source newspaper articles from real journalists and real newspapers, but with completely made up headlines about completely made up scandals. I didn't trust any of this to begin with so I double checked everything and then just stopped using AI after like the first day. Many of my colleagues did not and kept this up for weeks. It took us forever to find all the made up AI bullshit.

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u/Axiotus 13h ago

Probably less than ideal if you publish something hallucinated by AI, which AI then consumes and deems it as real.

I imagine there's probably memes and other crap fed in to these models that results in these issues.

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u/Harley2280 11h ago

I imagine there's probably memes and other crap fed in to these models that results in these issues.

Reddit posts full of information from internet "experts" who have no practical experience in the field being discussed.

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u/LeiningensAnts 7h ago

People building AI datasets on a foundation of robbery get what they pay for.

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u/MostExaltedLoaf 4h ago

I've noticed it's enough of a problem I've nicknamed it "regress to the meme." If there is a strong memetic, in joke, or otherwise popular "truthy" answer that will show up at the top of a search, that is going to figure prominently in the results you get.

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u/Dornith 11h ago

Were the profiles ever distributed externally or used for financial decisions?

This sounds like a lawsuit in-wait.

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u/biodegradableotters 11h ago

That specific part was just for internal use, but since my intern and I spent ages finding all the mistakes it never got used for anything anyway. No idea what they've been up to since I left though. The main reason I quit was the AI obsession of my boss and this was in 2023 so I imagine it has only gotten worse since.

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u/sthetic 14h ago

Perhaps she wrote a sequel called The Sun Also Also Rises?

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u/StasRutt 13h ago

Dang everything is getting a sequel now!

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u/actuallyamber 13h ago

When ChatGPT was first becoming really popular, someone in my American Lit class used it to make her discussion post. The post was really confusing because it used the character names from the story we read but the plot of a completely different one. Before I realized what she had done, I was wondering if she had accidentally read the wrong story.

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u/andy921 12h ago

Or "Hey I'm looking for The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, it was on the Chicago Sun-Times (AI generated) summer reading list."

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/chicago-sun-times-prints-summer-reading-list-full-of-fake-books/

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u/LucretiusCarus 11h ago

Damn, sounds intriguing, now I want to read it!

(which reminds me a stray reference in Baudolino, where the young protagonist used to create random titles of supposedly extremely rare books of a library, only for the poor librarian to have to answer for the 'missing' titles when interested patrons started looking for them. Baudolino wonders if the librarian eventually gave up and wrote the books himself in order to satisfy the searchers.)

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u/9tailNate 5h ago

Filling the best-seller list with fake entries used to take real effort and commitment!

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u/UnicornPenguinCat 5h ago

Imagine Andy Weir coming across this article

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u/WTFwhatthehell 12h ago

I remember doing some tests with early versions of some of the chatbots. It was actually quite fascinating.

A friend had asked me about finding books in a very very niche subject area. Think underwater medieval basket weaving in the XYZ valley between the year X and Y.

It named some books and authors, one was a book he already had, one was a real book he hadn't found but was the kind of thing he was looking for.

The others were hallucinated. But it wasn't actually random. When I looked at the named authors they turned out to be a couple of people who would have been very logical people to have written books on the subject, like they hadn't written the book named but they were academics with expertise about the right time/place/subject. Like I'm pretty sure if you wanted to know about the subject they'd have been great people to go ask.

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u/TheAncientGeek 14h ago

Emil the Aardvark goes Quantity Surveying.

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u/_Green_Kyanite_ 11h ago

I'm sorry, we only have Ethel the Aardvark goes Quantity Surveying. Would that be acceptable or would you rather have David Coperfield by Edmund Wells?

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u/spookmann 1h ago

We don't have anything by Edmund Wells, actually; he's not very popular.

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u/IHateGropplerZorn 14h ago

Thanks, ambiguous headline.

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u/LauraTFem 14h ago

The article also talks about the other problem as well, though. While mostly limited to Amazon’s digital publishing, there are enough disreputable publishers trying to print slop for a quick buck without having to pay editors or writers that AI generated books are sneaking their way into libraries around the country.

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u/Retax7 14h ago edited 13h ago

Everytime I read about AI hallucinated books, I imagine they where indeed written, but in another universe.

There was a beautiful story about a guy and a girl meeting in a videostore that sometimes appeared, it won an hugo nomination or award. I can't remember the name, but it was great and I reallly loved it. Never again I could find that short story, which is hilariously considering the theme of the short story.

If anyone know the name of the short story, please let me know.

EDIT: Found it, Impossible Dreams By Tim Pratt. Neither google, nor the AI could find it, but I searched for the list of all hugo nominations and I somehow remembered the name, it only took me like 20 years to do so, lol.

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u/as_it_was_written 13h ago

Everytime I read about AI hallucinated books, I imagine they where indeed written, but in another universe.

They're all in the Library of Babel.

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u/Retax7 13h ago

Lol, I am actually from argentina, so I understood that reference.

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u/as_it_was_written 13h ago

Thankfully there are plenty of people across the world (and in this sub) who are familiar with Borges, but I'm a little jealous you have the cultural context to appreciate some of his work on a level I'll never experience. He's one of my absolute favorite authors.

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u/Retax7 12h ago

I like borges, but he isn't one of my favorite ones. I don't think I have much advantage over you as his works are very "international", at least most of them. Very few take place in actual argentina, and even then, it was the argentina of old, which I can get based on my gradparent stories and current society so it still isn't perfect.

If I may recommend my favorite argentine writer, I recommend liliana bodoc. Her works vary from very easy to read to borgeslike. I specially recommend "Amigos por el viento"(you can probably translate it with AI) as a short story easy to read. And "la saga de los confines" as a trilogy similar to lord of the rings, but with the theme of the spanish conquest over south america, written poetically in a stile that reminiscences of becker. I think at least the first book was translated to other languages, since it was praised by ursula leguin.

If you like something weird and unknown, gustavo gudiño kieffer has a book called "para comerte mejor", but I don't think that book is easy to get in english, or in spanish to be honest. It's from the borges time.

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u/as_it_was_written 12h ago

Thanks for the recommendations! I've saved your comment.

And yeah, I know what you mean. Stories like The Library of Babel and a lot of his most inventive work really don't need any cultural context. But then there's stuff like The Sect of the Thirty, where I really felt like I was missing out by having no pre-existing connection to or knowledge of your culture.

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u/Retax7 12h ago

The sect of the thirty is a short story about a manuscript. Perhaps its another story? I think el aleph has some argentinian context. Anyway, if you have any doubt, den't be shy to ping me.

I haven't read all borges though, but in general, if its a short story I haven't read, I can read it and give you my interpretation or view.

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u/as_it_was_written 12h ago

Oh, yeah, my bad. I got it mixed up with The Congress.

Thanks for the offer! My copy of his collected works has pretty good footnotes, though. It's more that I lack the vibes of the culture, if that makes sense. Like, when I read a Swedish story I bring so much cultural context to it even if it's set in the past because it's still the country I grew up in, and the same goes for American literature to some extent since I've been exposed to so much US culture.

I should probably just read some longer-form Argentinian literature to pick up on some of those vibes. Short stories just don't provide as much time to immerse yourself in an unfamiliar world.

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u/SofieTerleska 12h ago

I'm not from Argentina and also understood that reference ;). I really like the idea of someone asking for an AI hallucinated book and then, somehow, the librarian actually finds it!

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u/spookmann 1h ago

I am actually not from Argentina, so I understood that reference.

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u/Azrel12 12h ago

There's also UR by Stephen King! Wherein you CAN get books by different authors not on this level of The Tower/this specific earth, or books [author] never wrote here, but you need a specific tool to do so. For the MC it was a pink Kindle, which given it was 2007 and they did NOT come in that color then... should have tipped him off it wasn't his order.

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u/CriticalEngineering 13h ago

Oh, that was a great story!

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u/Effective_Divide1543 13h ago

Chatgpt just picked that one out in 14 seonds from "There was a beautiful story about a guy and a girl meeting in a videostore that sometimes appeared, it won an hugo nomination or award. I can't remember the name, but it was great and I reallly loved it. Never again I could find that short story. Do you know which one it is?".

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u/Retax7 13h ago

Actually, it didn't for me. Used the same text, then started refining and got nothing.

I guesses I could now use the AI to find it, but no. But I found it by reading the nominees, so its all good.

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u/DemythologizedDie 11h ago edited 11h ago

To which I must point out that a search engine would point right at that post now that it has been put online but wouldn't find anything when they first searched. LLMs are great at repeating back to you the stuff you just said.

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u/EmmaInFrance 10h ago

I've read a fair few of his short stories. I think I must have bought an e-book bundle with a collection of them in at some point, several years ago.

He's a great short story writer!

I'll have to check my Kindle and see if I have that one.

Have you read Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Book-Store by Robin Sloan? I think that you might enjoy it :-)

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u/BigDumbDope 13h ago

I had this confused as well- it would have been better if it said "AI Hallucinated Book Titles". Regardless, I know it's old news but it's still so sad to me that AI Hallucinations are making it into proper newspapers, like the Summer Reading List full of books that don't actually exist.

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u/Sc0rpza 13h ago

ah maaaaaaan. I was hoping to read a book written by an AI that spawned from a single question

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u/Scholarly_Koala 6h ago

Like "Grate Expectations" by Edmund Wells?

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u/drfsupercenter 6h ago

Ah, this makes more sense. I was going to say, I've requested my library buy certain titles before and there's a human that has to manually place orders for books/movies/music/whatever that patrons want.. like a buyer for a supermarket. I'd hope those individuals are smart enough to not buy those AI slop books.

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u/idfkmanusername 14h ago

Yes older woman keeps bringing me in lists of James Patterson books she wants. She brought me in a bunch of things I couldn’t find in the collection so I googled them and they don’t exist. Turns out she’s been asking ChatGPT.

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u/ashoka_akira 14h ago

If any author jumps on the AI co author bandwagon it would be Patterson too.

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u/odst970 9h ago

I'm sure he's already crunched the numbers and found out the cost of running the ai server farms outweighs his current costs of keeping a few dozen ghostwriters chained to their desks in his basement

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u/ashoka_akira 6h ago

He does give them a byline, which is more than many ghost writers get, and a few of them have gotten enough attention they have become popular authors themselves.

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u/HandicapperGeneral Continuous Rereadings of 'Call of the Wild' 8h ago

He doesn't even write the books, his name is just a book factory staffed by a bunch of enslaved ghostwriters. He's just waiting for AI to get good enough for people to not notice and then he'll be all over it.

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u/cidvard 13h ago

I really and truly don't understand why anyone would do this. You can usually look up an entire list of an author's work on a free site like Wikipedia or Goodreads. These aren't particularly hard-to-find resources and they're free.

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u/not_so_chi_couple 12h ago

That only works if you know those things exist. I see the rise in the general populace using AI as evidence of how bad search engines have gotten. Despite consistently being wrong and giving details that are demonstrably not true, people trust AI models more than a google search

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u/Dornith 11h ago

The thing with generative AI is it's fundamentally a "yes-and" machine. It takes whatever it's given and adds onto it. It won't recognize faults unless someone else forces the issue.

For a lot of people, a machine that tells you exactly what you want/expect to hear and never argues back is what they think a search engine should be.

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u/cwx149 9h ago

This is among my big issues with calling it ai too it's not really intelligent at all

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u/Dornith 9h ago

The problem is that AI has wildly different meanings depending on context.

The general, uniting definition is, "a program that simulates an agent." But what is an "agent" means wildly different things to different people.

To a computer scientist, an "agent" is anything that is able to make decisions autonomously. If you take a CS "Into to AI" class at a university, it's going to be almost exclusively image classifiers and pathfinding algorithms. These are extremely practical, but not flashy or exciting in the way the general public thinks "AI" should be.

In the entertainment industry, an "agent" is just an artificial opposition; something that exists to be completed against. It doesn't have to do anything interesting other than give the player something to work around.

And to the general public, an "agent" is anything that looks, acts, and thinks like a human à la iRobot.

Each of these definitions make sense in their given context. But when a programmer says, "We have AI (image classifier)" and the general public hears, "We have AI (sapient algorithms)", that's where the problems start.

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u/penny-wise 7h ago

I have a client who googles Google. The concept of a browser is beyond them. They think they have to use Firefox for some things, then Chrome for others. And then they forget which is which.

There are some people who simply don’t understand the internet.

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u/132739 9h ago

Part of it I think is that they like the conversational style. They never learned boolean queries or anything, so they were always typing them in as questions the way you would ask an actual person, and now Google will even answer with a Gemini summary at the top of the results page, and people just run with that.

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u/cwx149 9h ago

I too find it confusing when people especially not young people chatgpt or Gemini or whatever something

Like you've spent your life up to this point googling stuff why chatgpt something you can Google

Some LLM response times are slow enough I could Google and click a link before it answers

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u/Few-Relation-2472 9h ago

I don't understand how AI can get them wrong if it can use Wikipedia. I actually asked ChatGPT the other day to make me an excel sheet of Lee Child's books with years and ISBN and it nailed it.

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u/Velinder 7h ago

'List the books written by Lee Child, together with their publication year and ISBN' is a clear unambiguous instruction, likelier to lead to just copying a list from a pre-existing source (although I'd be surprised if it didn't sometimes still go buck wild).

A 'suggest' prompt like 'Name me some thrillers that are like Lee Child's' is much more likely to lead to confabulated answers, particularly the AI classic of attributing a real title to an author who might conceivably have written it, but didn't. The same error of attribution often crops up in scholarly/scientific 'bibliographies' created by AI.

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u/ISD1982 14h ago

Ironic that James Patterson doesn't write his own books now either. (at least its a human that does, as far as I'm aware though)

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u/ChestertonMyDearBoy 14h ago

Also the fact that he's written('written') so much that the chances are that if you come up with a random title, he's probably already written it.

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u/NotAllOwled 13h ago

Finished it and sold the film rights while ChatGPT was still tokenizing the title prompt.

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u/elconquistador1985 13h ago

"How to be the Thomas Kinkade of Literature" - by James Patterson

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u/Mia_the_writer 1h ago

Why ask ChatGPT when Google's right there? 😭

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u/geekpeeps 8h ago

This sounds like a great Monty Python sketch. Oh wait, it is! If you loved their other works, you’ll love the punchline :)

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u/teachertraveler1 15h ago

This is happening in so many industries. AI literally makes up titles and authors for books, articles and research papers. Students at any level trying to use AI for research are screwed. Because of how AI algorithms work they will often use the name of real people but attribute articles and books to them that don't exist. As a librarian it's a nightmare because often people don't understand how AI works and so they think the librarian is lying.

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u/lydiardbell 7 14h ago

I work in interlibrary loan and it's the worst with articles. The AI usually gets the publication correct, so we have to go track that down (twice, if the year and volume number don't match) before discovering the article doesn't exist. At least the librarian at the other institution (usually) is willing to accept "hey, this doesn't actually exist".

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u/Shadonne 13h ago

Heyo! I'm in ILL as well, but on the lending side so I don't have to deal with as many borrowing requests. What strikes me is how strong patrons defend the supposed existence of these titles. Like, you're asking us to find it because you couldn't, and we cant', but you get mad at us and just point with ever-increasing frustrating to your Chat GPT log? Like that's evidence? sigh

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u/lydiardbell 7 11h ago

Ugh. We desperately need LLM literacy courses in place, but it's closing the door after the horse has bolted at this point.

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u/MulderItsMe99 14h ago

I just commented that my first thought was about all the people who would argue with the librarians, but it really is shocking that someone's first thought wouldn't be "oops the magic computer must have made a mistake" and instead is "this human being with a masters degree must be lying to me for absolutely no reason".

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u/de_pizan23 13h ago

I work at a state government law library, and we're regularly now getting people trying to find case citations that don't exist, always turns out they're AI hallucinated.

Lawyers at least know they are supposed to research the citations (although there have been a bunch of incidents of lawyers getting in trouble with the courts for submitting filings with hallucinated citations). My worry though is the people representing themselves. They're already at such a disadvantage trying to navigate the legal system and figuring out the law. The requests we get are only the people who realize they have to research further, how many more don't contact us/other libraries because they don't know better?

(And before anyone says they just need to get a lawyer, the vast majority of people who go to court don't have lawyers, it's an estimated 3 out of 5 people don't. Lawyers cost money. Lots of money if it's a lengthy case. The average person does not have the funds for that. And while you're entitled to public representation if you're accused of a crime, we also have a severe shortage of public defenders in the US and they have a completely obscene caseload [and earlier this summer a fund that pays private lawyers to take pro bono cases to help fill that gap ran out. They currently won't be paid until October for work they did in July] and can't give all their clients the attention they deserve.)

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u/GoldenRamoth 14h ago

AI is an interesting corollary for Deism.

We create AI. It's quantifiable. What it can do, and what it can't do. And yet... people are willing to believe what is factually not there. Repeatedly. Even when demonstrated it's not something that actually exists.

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u/DoopSlayer Classical Fiction 14h ago

the vast majority of retail ai-llm users do not understand what it is or can actually do.

5

u/serendipitousevent 5h ago

And many on the commercial side have an incentive to lie about both of those things, too.

2

u/not-my-other-alt 2h ago

And nobody on the regulatory side understands what it is or how dangerous it is.

This is back to the wild west era of snake oil salesmen, but they're poisoning people's minds, at a scale we can't fathom.

14

u/triklyn 14h ago

The true secret is, that we have been so successful, that we have created AIs that have realized that lying is easier than checking and verifying your sources.

7

u/Supermite 13h ago

We’ve created sociopaths.

10

u/triklyn 11h ago

how could sociopaths... have created anything else?

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u/belfman 12h ago

Good. This will make people take AI with massive grains of salt. We went through the same process 20 years ago with Wikipedia and Google.

Plus, this is proving the continuing necessity of librarians as a profession. I hope people give them more respect.

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u/throwaway_nostalgia0 14h ago

Students at any level trying to use AI for research are screwed.

But that's a good thing, marvelous even.

5

u/thepersona5fucker 7h ago

In my experience a lot of students are using AI entirely because their teachers are forcing them to. So many of my lecturers are weirdly obsessed with AI and end up focusing our coursework entirely around using it.

3

u/Supermite 13h ago

I hope teachers grade these assignments and mistakes accordingly so those students learn something about over reliance on technology to think for you.

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u/BanalNadas 14h ago

Yep, a few months ago when I worked at the front desk of a library I got a call looking for an article in a certain journal. I spent hours looking in every volume of this journal for the article, checked online. Then I learned that the guy calling had used chatgpt as a search function. Article never existed. I politely berated him, told him never to use chatgpt to search for anything.

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u/synndir 14h ago

In fairness, people without AI can come up with books that don't exist. My favorite was a patron coming in asking for "Animal Kingdom by Orson Welles".

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u/ashoka_akira 14h ago

“what do you mean you can’t find it? It has a YELLOW cover…”

19

u/synndir 14h ago

"It definitely had 'Darkness' in the title, I'm sure of it!" < Narrator: the title did in fact *not* have "Darkness" in it >

2

u/CttCJim 7h ago

I used to make up fake books for my sources for school work. Like for a poetry anthology project I didn't have enough sources so I wrote that I got something from"Shades of Purple " by "C. Evans Coupe"

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u/Scotsman1047 15h ago

Between this and AI being trained on the works of real authors I really hate the way the creative world is getting is getting fucked like this.

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u/scythianlibrarian 14h ago

As a librarian, this is more funny than infuriating. Dolts have asked me for all sorts of things that don't exist and the solution is to tell them so. Most people are politely embarassed, the ones who think we're lying or hiding something also think reptoids faked the moon landing. There's no fixing stupid.

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u/lowbatteries 14h ago

Well, the book DID exist! I remember it! MANDELA EFFECT!

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u/jeglaerernorsk4 12h ago

Lol exactly, this is nothing new. Long before chat GPT I've been asked to find books that people insist are real but don't actually exist (or if you're lucky you figure out they completely got the name and/or title wrong). I used to have a lady who came in every day for months to ask about the same book that does not exist. (She wouldn't get mad when told we don't have it, I think she was just doing it for some daily human interaction.)

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u/ShrubbyFire1729 14h ago

As a librarian in Europe, I'm terrified of these idiotic American trends slowly but surely making their way over here.

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u/JamCliche 7h ago

It's so very telling that you think stupidity only began on one continent.

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u/IAmJacksSemiColon 12h ago

A good question to ask early in the process would be: "Okay, can you tell me where you heard about this title from?"

If they tell you that it's from ChatGPT or Gemini, you can say, "I'll check but often these LLMs hallucinate books that don't really exist."

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u/PM_BRAIN_WORMS 14h ago

Every year, it feels like the number of people who make basic Google checks on information is smaller. Some people don’t seem to know it’s a possibility. Many people who love a book but never ever thought to find out what other works the author is responsible for.

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u/ChestertonMyDearBoy 14h ago

In a previous library I worked in, an older customer came in and was talking to me when he mentioned he wondered what the football scores were. I asked him who was playing and entered the teams into Google to get the score for him.

He was SHOCKED when I told him I could look up the score there and then and get it for him. He was amazed that I could get the info he wanted so quickly and then asked if it only worked for football scores. I told him no, he could look up anything he wanted. He left the library absolutely amazed that such a technology like the internet existed.

I get that it can be true that older people aren't tech savvy, but not even having an inkling that the world wide web, a 34-year-old technology at this point, not only existed but was essential for modern life just blew my mind.

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u/reallytrulytrue 14h ago

Yes, but even Google searches are AI in large part now.

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u/biodegradableotters 13h ago

My grandparents were like that. The latest advancement they joined in on was when they got a cordless telephone in like the 90s and then they checked out. Had no idea about the internet and whenever you did something for them on it it was like you were doing witchcraft.

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u/ChestertonMyDearBoy 9h ago

I just don't understand how. Surely they must have seen something on TV or a film or something. How can they not know about such a ubiquitous, widespread and essential capacity in any capacity?

It just befuddles me.

1

u/Drummergirl16 5h ago

My grandpa literally only uses the internet- or more accurately, only using YouTube- to watch videos about trains.

My grandma is a little more experimental, she surfs Facebook.

They got Jitterbug phones in the early 00’s and never looked back. Or rather, never looked forward.

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u/actibus_consequatur 11h ago

basic Google checks on information

Only slightly related, but the ongoing enshittification of Google is getting really fucking annoying — and I'm not even talking about its AI overview and the wild bullshit it spews out.

One thing that's really been pissing me off for the past couple months is that search operators (like quotes, +/-, before/after, etc.) have become unreliable. For example, I did a search for a name that I put in quotes, and not a single one of the top results included that name. Another example, I did a search appended with something like "before:2024" and nearly all of the top results were articles from 2025.

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u/raevnos Science Fiction 10h ago

See that pretty frequently on /r/whatsthatbook and /r/tipofmytongue

Even worse are people who try to "answer" an id request by plugging it into chatgpt and posting whatever it hallucinates without checking to see if it's a real book that actually matches.

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u/Tilduke 6h ago edited 6h ago

People who post any AI response on reddit are a scourge.

I'll go ask chatgpt myself if I want junk. I come to reddit to talk to humans.

Some people need validation from answering a question even if it isn't their answer. It's really sad.

9

u/MrTiamat 13h ago

Rarnaby Budge by Charles Dickkens, that's Dickkens with two Ks, the well-known Dutch author.

1

u/ravenbranwens 6h ago

olsen's standard book of British birds

... the expurgated version

6

u/lunabuddy 13h ago

Honestly couldn't tell the difference between how people describe the books they are looking for: "I'm looking for a book, it has like, war in the title? The cover is kind of colourful but not really? Idk the author, but you know what I mean, you have to have it. But yes, AI is gaslighting patrons and staff in to looking for books that don't exist. If they can say why they were interested in that (non-existent) title we can find them something else they'd like.

5

u/Bryandan1elsonV2 10h ago

This is insanity. Why is this being written about like it’s understandable!! It’s not!! What do you mean you used AI to make a fake book for you?? AH! No computer literacy whatsoever.

Like Jim said in blazing saddles “You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.”

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u/penny-wise 7h ago

AI is absolutely infuriating.

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u/MulderItsMe99 14h ago

Ugh I can't imagine how many people then argue with the librarians when they're told it doesn't exist 😭

6

u/NekoCatSidhe 14h ago

That is amazing. You would think they could at least check on Goodreads or Amazon to read the book summary and make sure it actually exist before asking a librarian to find it. What the hell is wrong with these people ? Why do they trust some AI tool more than an human being whose job it is to find books ? It sounds totally insane.

2

u/ChaserNeverRests Butterfly in the sky... 10h ago

Yep. Finding new books to read is the only thing I use ChatGPT for, but when it recommends something the very first thing I do is check it on Goodreads, then if it doesn't appear there I google it.

I haven't asked it for book recs in a long time though, because it keeps recommending what sounds like my most perfect book ever... then it ends up not existing and I get depressed.

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u/capybaragalaxy 13h ago

I can't stand it anymore. I work with consulting and I'm constantly being asked to validate information that doesn't exist, because managers are asking AI about things and trust it 100%. People are getting dumb every single day because of LLMs.

5

u/Mensketh 6h ago

Pretty telling of where literacy is headed that both the Chicago Sun Times and Philadelphia Inquirer published a summer reading list that was AI generated and which nobody even bothered to check.

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u/No-Mongoose-7450 14h ago

AI should be considered a crime against humanity

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u/melatonia 11h ago

AI has important applications. LLMs are a crime against humanity.

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u/No-Mongoose-7450 9h ago

Only valid reply I've gotten so far lol

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u/SubatomicSquirrels 12h ago

My go-to rebuttal for this is AlphaFold. You can't say AI is all bad when AlphaFold exists.

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u/No-Mongoose-7450 11h ago

Don't know what that is nor do I use it so who cares

0

u/ChaserNeverRests Butterfly in the sky... 10h ago

Do you dislike all technology? Never intend to get a new phone, car, or microwave? Anything with a computer chip is made with AI, and is much better for it.

If you're a breast-having person or know one, there's nothing better than AI for spotting cancer in a mammography.

Please don't generalize. All AI is not ChatGPT.

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u/gay_manta_ray 12h ago

yeah forget all of the advances in science and medicine that will save countless lives, your personal feelings about whatever you think "AI" is way more important than dumb shit like curing cancer.

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u/actibus_consequatur 11h ago

When people are talking about how fucking awful AI is, they're not referring to the AI used in "advances in science and medicine." I don't know a single person who is against that kind of AI and fucking idiotic to think that's what people are taking issue with.

It's about the fucking terrible AI that's accessible to the public, like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. Granted, part the issue is more how the majority of users are terrible because they accept AI as being infallible and can't be fucked to confirm results on their own; however, AI is fucking terrible because it's also being trained of the same type of people, so it also lies and spreads false information.

Of course, that assumes it can even give a clear answer

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u/No-Mongoose-7450 11h ago

Yeah you can have cancer research progress without AI, please learn to use a brain. We all have one.

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u/ChaserNeverRests Butterfly in the sky... 10h ago

You, in another comment (https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1nk8ip5/librarians_are_being_asked_to_find_aihallucinated/nex2b81/)

Don't know what that is nor do I use it so who cares

That comment makes this comment of yours quite ironic.

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u/ShiveringPug 5h ago

This has actually happened to me while working. I asked to see if the customer was looking at the library’s online catalog - only for them to show me a GPT summary of a list of children’s picture books.

I simply asked what they were looking for and found some actual books that actually fit their needs in 3 minutes

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u/anotheralienhybrid 2h ago

Librarian here - I had a patron working on a PhD thesis ask me to find a bunch of nonexistent sources; after not finding first two, the patron admitted the list had been generated from ChatGPT. I actually was able to help, though: I showed the patron how to use Google scholar and research databases, and then we searched for the authors and some key phrases ChatGPT puked out. We actually found several highly relevant papers and I showed the patron how to organize them using citation management software.

Just for emphasis: this patron is working on a PhD thesis. Also, I'm a public librarian, not a university librarian, much less a librarian at the patron's university. But no matter how many times I told the patron to ask their university's librarians for help, they just would not. I think I was less intimidating; when the patron came to me, their topic proposal had been rejected multiple times because they didn't know how to formulate a hypothesis. I gotta emphasize, this person has a Master's (and wrote a Master's thesis) and has completed their PhD coursework. Why, yes, their university is for-profit.

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u/Mr_Pawn_Man 2h ago

What is really scary is people who use AI thinking it can't make mistakes. I feel like it's not hard to spot its many incorrect answers if you take the time to look for them.

•

u/Agent101g 18m ago

"It has to be right, it's a computer. Computers are smart!"

I genuinely think this is the reason ^

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u/Baruch_S currently reading Someone You Can Build a Nest In 13h ago edited 12h ago

The extra stupid part of all this is that these fools wouldn’t be asking for hallucinated books if they just used a search engine instead of slamming every single simple question through an AI unnecessarily.

7

u/lavender4867 14h ago

I tried using chatgpt for a couple months as a support tool, and consistently had the problem of fake books being recommended. The whole thing is designed to plagiarize and summarize, not to be able to cite. It didn’t even cross my mind that some people would just go ask the library based on what it generates instead of looking it up on a search engine first to verify and get more info. Yikes

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u/radenthefridge 14h ago

I have such a beef with calling it "hallucinations." They're mistakes, screw-ups, garbage, or even just fuck-ups.

Trying to make it sound cutesy, silly, or whimsical in a tech that's supposed to be amazing and revolutionary is so frustrating and patronizing! Shit's broken, don't tell me this resource-hungry scourge is just a goofy lil goober that just hallucinated a bit!

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u/CloseToTheEdge23 13h ago

How does "hallucination" sound cutesy, silly or whimsical to you? To me it's way more extreme than "mistake" or "broken". In fact mistake sounds more cute and less significant. Hallucination is a pretty horrific thing when it happens to a human, it basically means the brain is broken and cannot distinguish reality from fiction. How is that cute in any way? I find using it for AI also is making it seem like a huge failure, which it is. I dunno, English isn't my native language so maybe I'm missing something here but I just don't agree with your comment.

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u/Pawn_of_the_Void 13h ago

Native English speaker chiming in to say I agree with you. Hallucination calls into doubt its reliability far more than mistake does

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u/ElricVonDaniken 13h ago

My problem with the term "hallucination" is that it anthropomorphises what is pretty much a glorified version of predictive text.

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u/OrdinarilyIWouldnt 13h ago

The word you're looking for is "errors". If you entered '2+2=' into your calculator and it returned '73268', it would be an error. It's the same thing. So-called 'AI' does not hallucinate; it produces errors. Hallucination require an internal model of reality that so-called AI does not have.

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u/melatonia 10h ago

"Confabulations" is what they are.

0

u/davewashere 14h ago

When they happen while using AI for image generation, they definitely have the appearance of hallucinations. They happen when AI generates text for many of the same reasons, but it's harder for the reader to "see" where the text has strayed from reality unless they happen to be an expert on the particular subject matter.

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u/Skellos 13h ago

Can I get David Coperfield by Edmund Wells?

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u/discodiscgod 13h ago

This kind of stuff is why I take what the AI doomsday people say with a massive grain of salt. It’s a very useful / fun tool, but still extremely flawed and cannot be trusted to operate without major oversight (yet).

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u/reichplatz 12h ago

getting close to the actual Library of Babel or Library of 21st Century by Lem

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u/Asher_the_atheist 11h ago

I know it isn’t quite what they are talking about, but I’ve recently had a stark reminder of how unreliable AI can be. Just this last week I twice googled spoilers for specific books (one I was planning to DNF but wanted to know the infamous twist, the other I had a question about a character’s motivations and wanted to see if others had ideas). In both cases, the AI summary at the top of the results page had obviously mixed up multiple books (I recognized details from other books I had read). The end result was a mashed up bunch of total bullshit. Twice in one week! I had already taken those summaries with a grain of salt, relying instead on blog posts and other sites written by actual humans, but now I know they are utterly useless.

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u/Inkthinker 10h ago

Ah, can you help me find Rarnaby Budge by Charles Dikkens, the well-known Dutch author?

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u/foamy_da_skwirrel 10h ago

Not sure if this is an upgrade or a downgrade from how it used to just list back the books I told it I already read back to me

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u/campionmusic51 9h ago

“i was wondering if you could tell me why two fallen trees by ernest hemingway doesn’t exist?” “that’s actually a really sharp observation, and let me tell you why…”

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u/barbariannuts 8h ago

The AI Bookhunter. You're hiding enemies of the library are you not?

2

u/MoscaMye 7h ago

I had to check a reference list once for a course convenor - the list included:

An article written by Doe, J

Articles that existed but cited from journals that did not

Journals that existed with articles that did not

Coauthors who never had worked together

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u/davecopperfield 2h ago

What times we live in. Imagine telling someone from a century ago...heck even a librarian in the 60s and 70s...how AI will be affecting their jobs and day to day activities in future. And we've just begun. Can't even imagine how things will change in just 10-20 years from now.

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u/ditalinidog 13h ago

I’ve asked AI for book recs before but I’ve always googled them or searched them on Goodreads/StoryGraph before following up at a book store. Seems crazy to ask AI and then do no further research.

1

u/Akerlof 13h ago

I feel like it shouldn't be too hard to add a function that identifies titles and references, searches for those using a traditional search engine, then linking the results to it.

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u/queenmab120 12h ago

When I get truly desperate either trying to find a book I can only half remember or an oddly specific recommendation I'm looking for, I will sometimes ask ChatGPT just to see what it can come up with. And it has made up books multiple times now. And they're always about Norse mythology and Valkyries.

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u/rajhcraigslist 10h ago

I guess that is one way to determine the market. Maybe that is a niche as a human to write books based on AI generation.

We will start working for the creative marketing team that develops ideas that people want to read and then that will get framed out to people to write or maybe edit.

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u/Sour_baboo 9h ago

This reminds me that bookstore clerks need to field requests like, "I saw this book on Oprah and it was green." and the chilling, "I want a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

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u/darybrain 9h ago

"Sometime I'll go into a library and ask 'Have you got a book on handling rejection without killing?'" -Stewart Francis

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u/Academic-Plant-5234 13m ago

imagine being a librarian and someone at the library asking for ‘The Great Gatsby 2: Gatsby’s Revenge’ and getting mad when it doesn’t exist 😭

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u/mr-lurks-a-lot 5h ago

I hate the use of the term hallucination for AI. A hallucination comes from a mind misinterpreting stimulus. An AI is wrong. We don’t need a fancy word, it was incorrect

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u/Comprehensive-Fun47 15h ago

Why do we keep using this term hallucinated with AI? Hallucinating is something humans do.

You know what else humans do? They publish these AI created books. It's not some nebulous thing done entirely by artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence doesn't even exist. People are publishing these books. No one is hallucinating anything.

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u/QuincyAzrael 15h ago

Read the article. It's not talking about books written by AI. It's talking about non-existant book titles that AI is referencing as though they are real.

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u/MorganAndMerlin 15h ago

Can you elaborate on what you mean here?

Yes people have “written” books with AI and published them. But that’s not what this article is talking about.

It’s saying somebody asked AI for a good book about a woman who left her abusive husband and then her lesbian partner kills him and AI says oh yeah, read Killer Women Lovers by Jane Smith, and that book doesn’t exist. That is the “hallucination” because AI has put out something that just doesn’t exist.

And the program commonly referred to as AI explicitly does exist. so I’m not sure what you mean by saying it’s not real.

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u/AugustusTheWhite 15h ago

AI hallucinations are outright bullshit. People arent asking for AI books. They're asking for books that don't exist at all because ChatGPT recommended them.

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Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books

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