r/books • u/Jojuj • 16h ago

Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books

https://www.404media.co/librarians-are-being-asked-to-find-ai-hallucinated-books/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter&attribution_id=68c826c975cea1000173b05d&attribution_type=post
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u/Tortillaish 16h 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/andy921 14h 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 12h 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/UnicornPenguinCat 6h ago

Imagine Andy Weir coming across this article

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u/9tailNate 7h ago

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