Category: Literature

“Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books”

“Reading list [created by generative AI] in advertorial supplement contains 66% made up books by real authors.”

Apparently not created by the Sun-Times:

“The reading list appeared in a 64-page supplement called ‘Heat Index,’ which was a promotional section not specific to Chicago. Buscaglia told 404 Media the content was meant to be ‘generic and national’ and would be inserted into newspapers around the country.”

(Original Facebook post.)

Jedediah Berry’s new book got reviewed by an LLM, which completely made up characters and situations.

(Original Facebook post.)

A month ago, File 770 carried an item in which an author said that he had asked ChatGPT for a blurb for his book. He seemed to be delighted that ChatGPT had not only read his book, but loved it; ChatGPT called it a “captivating narrative.” The author continued:

Could [ChatGPT] have reached into my computer and read my novel and then compared it to the thousands of other novels and their reviews that have been uploaded to its massive database? And now makes a value judgement like that?

It could do so in a nanosecond.

The author claimed to “know a bit about AI,” but unfortunately appeared to misunderstand what ChatGPT does.

A few commenters provided corrections/clarifications, but anyone who didn’t read the comments may have been left with the impression that ChatGPT “know[s] more than humans do” and that it read this book and thought it was great.

I’m posting all this not to pick on the specific author, nor on File 770’s editor/owner, but rather because it’s just one instance of what I suspect is a very widespread misunderstanding.

So, just in case anyone who sees this post of mine is uncertain:

ChatGPT is more like a game of Mad Libs than like a person. It’s not sentient. It doesn’t “read” a book, and it doesn’t “make a value judgement” about a book. The way it works (very roughly) is that, given some input words, it chooses a sequence of words based on which word is the most likely next word in the sequence. (Where it determines what’s “most likely” by having been trained on an enormous number of examples of text written by humans.)

Its training included a vast number of book blurbs (I would guess millions of them), so when it‘s asked to write a book blurb, it creates a sequence of words that looks a lot like all of the other blurbs out there.

So ChatGPT didn’t evaluate this book and find it “captivating.” Instead, ChatGPT created a sequence of words that was similar to the sequences of words used in other blurbs, and the phrase “captivating narrative” is a very common phrase, so it used that phrase.

(Original Facebook post.)

A teacher describes having students use generative AI to create literature reviews, and then having the students mark up which parts are true and which aren’t.

(Original Facebook post.)

Oh, look, another one.

In this article, “Proust, ChatGPT and the case of the forgotten quote,” an “author, academic and journalist” is looking for a quote from Proust, so she asks ChatGPT. She then spends a lot of time assuming that the information that ChatGPT provides is accurate (even after the second or third time that it blatantly contradicts itself) and fretting about how to ask ChatGPT followup questions without seeming rude.

Reminder:

CHATGPT MAKES THINGS UP.

IT IS NOT A RELIABLE SOURCE OF FACTUAL INFORMATION.

Authors and editors who publish articles that talk about ChatGPT as if it were a reliable source that has happened to get one or two things wrong are doing a disservice to their readers. (And the companies that have created Large Language Model AIs are doing a disservice to the world by not making it more explicitly clear that LLMs are not providing factual information.*)

I’ve now written to the author of this piece and to the Guardian to ask them not to write this kind of article in the future, but I have little hope of making an impression.

*The companies do provide disclaimers saying, more or less, that what the LLMs say might not be accurate. But judging by the articles I see, those disclaimers aren’t clear enough or aren’t visible enough.

(Original Facebook post.)