We Have Met the Enemy

Why does an AI-slop booklist appear in two major newspapers?

I lost track of the number of people who asked if I’d seen the story about the Chicago Sun-Times publishing a summer reading list filled with AI-generated slop.

Most of those books are entirely made up, as in do not exist, though I gotta say that I wouldn’t mind seeing what the real Percival Everett could do with that premise for “The Rainmakers.”

I supposed it’s a good sign of career progress that I’ve established a strong enough brand that people who know me know that this is a subject I should be writing about. The same thing happened with the “Everyone is cheating using AI” story that I covered a few weeks ago.

Sometimes I wish the things I do spend my time on - reading, writing, teaching writing, publishing - weren’t also collapsing around me on a daily basis, but you’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt in life.

I’ve said this a couple of times, but ChatGPT has been a serious boon to my career not because it makes me more efficient or a better writer but because the message I’ve been putting out for a decade-plus, the way we teach writing in schools is bad and counterproductive, is much more urgent. Some of the people who want help tackling this problem find me and we try to do some good work together. I believe we’re having some success in these individual initiatives, though I wouldn’t confuse individual success with systemic change.

Regarding the AI-slop book previews, some folks are wondering: How does such a thing happen? What does it mean for such a thing to happen?

While lots of people are offering interesting insights into this incident, I think I have a unique perspective. For one, I’ve recently published a book about writing in the age of AI. I even have a chapter directly addressing this phenomenon:

For two, I’ve been providing book-related content for the Chicago-area market for fourteen years and counting in the form of my weekly “Biblioracle” column at the Chicago Tribune. I know a little thing about producing reading lists meant to be consumed by newspaper audiences.

When people ask me how such a thing could happen, I think they are asking, at least subconsciously, “who is to blame?”

In the immortal words of Walt Kelly from his classic Pogo comic strip, We have met the enemy, and he is us.

The Case of the Writer Who F’d-Up

Over at Slate, Henry Grabar tracked down the specific person responsible for producing this content, one Marco Buscaglia, a 56-year-old Chicago writer. Buscaglia copped to the whole thing, relying on an LLM to generate the content and then failing to check it against reality.

It’s unforgivable, except it’s also understandable. As Grabar says, Buscaglia is a “media lifer with two writing degrees trying to automate his own freelance job, using A.I. to maintain an impossible human workload of low-paid gigs.” He was the sole human responsible for the 60-page summer supplement provided by King Features and let’s be clear, it is not possible for one person to produce that much content. Buscaglia admitted as much: “I have kind of accepted the fact that if somebody wants 60 pages’ worth of stories, there has to be some sort of compromise. But it should be a good compromise. It should be an ethical compromise, and an obvious compromise. And I blew that.”

Here’s what doing a genuine round-up would entail:

1. A survey of the seasonal catalogues of major and indie publishers, noting any items of interest.

2. Culling a master list to selections appropriate for the feature, perhaps looking for variety of genre, or publisher or what have you.

3. Drafting the list, including the capsule blurbs that accurately convey the forthcoming books.

4. Double checking that all of these books are going to indeed be released in the summer window (sometimes these things change).

If you are experienced at this, it is several hours of not particularly taxing work that nonetheless requires some diligence if you’re determined to deliver something at all meaningful as the product of human judgment to the reading audience. Pre-LLM you might be able to scrounge $200 for this kind of work. At 4-6 hours of total work you might net out at $35-50 an hour. Notice, none of this entails actually reading or considering the merits of any of these books. (This will be a factor in one of our future cases down the page.) This isn’t all that great when you’re considering the education and expertise of the person doing this work, but it’s the kind of thing many freelance writers have been grinding away at, trying to keep heads above water as the industry contracts.

My guess is that the pay for this individual chunk of the supplement has shrunk down to more like $25 for the spread, meaning doing the minimum credible job taking 4 hours would shrink the wage down to, well, you can do that math.

I have been paid the same wage for my Tribune column for the entire 14 years I’ve been doing it. No raises. Keeping up with inflation would mean it would have had to increase by something like 40% over this period.

And I’m the lucky one.

The Case of the Indifferent Publications

One of the nuttier facts of this incident is that no one at either the Chicago Sun-Times or the Philadelphia Inquirer noticed these errors before they were circulated to their readers. The Inquirer released their section on May 15th, almost a week before the mistakes were broadcast on social media. The papers say they do not vet this content as it comes from trusted third-party sources.

No kidding.

This is the same excuse used by Sports Illustrated when they published AI-generated content under fake AI-writer personas that had been provided by a third party content provider, and which was masquerading as genuine work by Sports Illustrated-affiliated journalists. (I discuss this example in More Than Words.)

Obviously newspapers should not be circulating this stuff to their audience, so the question is why?

Longtime Chicago journalist Eric Zorn reveals this part of the case, and shares something I bet most people have no idea about. Essentially, newspapers label these slop-enhanced editions as “premium issues” and jack up the cost to subscribers of those particular installments. Zorn also offers instructions on how to opt-out of these charges.

The Case of the Collapsed Industry

The newspapers charging subscribers inflated fees for crap readers didn’t ask for and won’t read is shady and desperate, a reflection of the fact that the economics of local news have been utterly destroyed and are never going to return.

I think everyone knows this, but this is one of those cases where it becomes apparent. The costs of this collapse are unfathomable and go well-beyond the fortunes of full-time and freelance journalists. The decline in local news literally contributes to an increase in corruption and a decline in democratic governance.

When I started my Biblioracle column I was part of a stand-alone book section larded with book coverage bespoke to the Chicago market: features on book clubs, local authors, cultural events, etc. Many weeks I am the only original book coverage in the entire newspaper. Every week I receive multiple pitches from publicists touting a book or author with ties to Chicago and I can cover almost none of them because I am one person, a freelancer who has to do his column in a particular way in order to keep the work sustainable for myself.

The Case of the Indifferent (or Insufficient) Audience

After Printers Row, the stand-alone book section, was discontinued, I thought that maybe readers could rally around the cause and implore the powers that be to continue the work. Several years after that I envisioned perhaps trying to recreate some semblance of that spirit under the banner of this newsletter.

Needless to say there was not sufficient enthusiasm for either prospect.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about you good folks. You are not indifferent, but there may simply not be enough of you left. At her newsletter Martha Bayne sorts through this incident via the lens of her past experience as a longtime staffer at the Chicago Reader, a free publication that was my near constant companion in my briefcase during the years I lived in the city. I would remove the previous issue when the new one arrived, reading it on the El or while grabbing a bite at lunch. There was more than enough to keep you occupied for a week.

Bayne notes that the Reader routinely did major book features, and I even contributed occasionally as a freelancer at the very start of my professional writing career.

Bayne attended the memorial for legendary journalist and Chicago Reader staffer Michael Miner who recently passed away at the age of 81. She recounts a scene following the service:

At the afterparty, some of my former colleagues and I sat for some time with one of the rare non-journalists present. She was open and curious about our bygone shared career, and we talked about what we believed to be valuable about the unusual newspapering we had done 20, 30, 40 years ago. We talked about what it was like to be women in positions of authority in the 90s and and early 2000s, the backbreaking collective labor of love we were so proud of, and how strange it is now to explain to people what our jobs used to be. The industry has changed so much, how do you explain why it mattered to someone with no frame of reference through which they might understand it?

“But you have to keep telling your story,” she said. “It’s important.”

“Why?” We responded, almost in unison. “No one cares. After a certain point it’s too depressing.”

I don’t think literally no one cares, but it’s clear too few people care. Let’s face it, this is true of reading and writing in general, let alone the kind of journalism that was practiced at the Chicago Reader.

Yes, the journalism industry collapsed, but what have we readers done in order to preserve that which we claim to value? Was the Chicago Reader only worth it because it was free?

The Case of the Takeover of Recommendation Culture

In a short and righteous newsletter post Christian Lorentzen points the finger at a culture that values listicle/capsule engagements with books over extended and careful inquiry and engagement.

The kind of book content that the AI-slop in this case is imitating is, let’s face it, popular, more likely to be read, a gatherer of more eyeballs, more attention, and therefore is more monetizable. This is the kind of thing audiences have said they want with their clicks, and so editors strive to give it to them, which means more surface-level content, less in-depth writing until eventually we have no one left who can write compelling book-related content, and therefore also no one left to read it.

Adam Morgan did some disturbing math recently.

It happened slowly, and I’ve probably helped contribute to the shift, but much more energy has gone towards articles on “What people are reading” in general, than what happens to people when we read.

There’s obviously nothing wrong with recommending books. I do it as part of my column every single week, hopefully in a way that doesn’t fall prey to recommendation culture, but when recommending books is the entirety of book culture, well…we don’t have a book culture anymore.

We become consumers of content, rather than readers of books. I would argue (and have argued) that the chief identity for the American of this era is a “consumer.”

This is obviously not limited to books. The New York Times, one of the few publications with stand-alone books coverage and staff writers, paid $30 million for the Wirecutter vertical, essentially a glorified recommendation engine for every consumer product under the sun that generates significant affiliate income. The New York Times has lots of writing in the form of news, opinion, reporting, and the like, but it is the content - Wirecutter, World, Cooking - that keeps the enterprise afloat.

I’d love to end on a note of hope, and there is hope to be had in that some thousands of you will read this far into a piece of writing about books and culture. I have similar hopes when I visit schools and universities and meet all the people who deeply care about preserving reading and writing.

But let’s not kid ourselves. We’re badly outnumbered and outresourced.

As I’ve aged I’ve grown comfortable (or maybe resigned) to the market’s indifference to the things I most value, those things I spend my time on which are collapsing around me. The only thing to do is keep doing it. What other choice is there?

The only defense is to keep living with some measure of intentionality where your choices reflect your values. This is why I don’t buy books at Amazon. It’s also why you won’t be seeing any more lists in my links that aren’t the byproduct of original human thought.

Everything below will be something I’ve read and thought about and think is worth your time. No more disposable book content shall be shared in this space.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I launched what I’m thinking of as one of my summer projects, to put a black mark on the development and use of historical chatbots and related technology. It’s “digital necromancy” and we should see it as an unacceptable affront to our moral sense.

A couple of nice recent reflections by others on More Than Words were recently published. One is from longtime teacher and writer Julian Girdham who latches onto my framework of “writing as thinking” and offers enhancements of his own. The other is from Peter Greene who makes the case for human writing at Forbes.

At Eric Zorn asked some questions of someone who calls himself “The Biblioracle” at his newsletter, The Picayune Sentinel.

“Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels.” I don’t know what to say about people who lack the respect for themselves or their audience to not do this, but it’s probably similar to the pressures that plagued Marco Buscaglia, productivity and efficiency above all. What a world we’ve made.

At Defector, Dan Sinykin champions a world of “close reading for everyone.” Yes.

At Slate, Annie Abrams declares that we need a push in schools for reading whole books that isn’t led by right wing, white supremacist nutcases.

Via my friends McSweeney's and by Amanda Bachman, “A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine.”

Recommendations

1. “The Hunter” by Tana French
2. “The Last Tycoon” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. “The Lemon Tree” by Julian Barnes
4. “Pineapple Street” by Jenny Jackson
5. “The Art Thief” by Michael Finley

Karen R - Beverly Hills, CA

For Karen I’m recommending a book that’s atypical in his oeuvre, but still an excellent coming-of-age novel, David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green.

I hope all those in the U.S have a happy and safe holiday weekend. I’ll be engaging in the time-honored ritual of seeing a Hollywood blockbuster Saturday night and then brunching on Sunday morning just after I speak at the Unitarian Church of Charleston. Come see me at Gage Hall on Archdale Street, 10am if you’re so inclined.

Take care,

JW

The Biblioracle