Well the name “Big Ben” does imply the existence of other, smaller Bens, doesn’t it? They must have been lost to time.
13 Likes
Please spay and neuter your Big Ben’s.
10 Likes
This was just posted by @tbretc.bsky.social on another platform. The Chicago Sun-Times obviously gets ChatGPT to write a ‘summer reads’ feature almost entirely made up of real authors but completely fake books. What are we coming to?
15 Likes
I got curious, so I looked up the second title since it kind of sounded like a reasonable name for a book, even if not by Andy Weir.
And that’s how I ran into this:
Which is also on Amazon:
So, apparently Isaac Asimov is still writing new books, in 2025… and even entire series of them:
Which is… impressive for someone who died in 1992 (although his capitalizations and punctuation seem to be going downhill at the end of that book title). I wonder what the sample looks like…
Definitely oddly written, and that sounds like a pretty ambitious summary for a book that is listed as being only 12 pages long. If I didn’t know better (*cough*), I’d suspect it was an AI-produced hallucination of a story. Interestingly, if I ask Google about “the last algorithm asimov”, the AI overview actually picks up on the problems:
11 Likes
And in trying to disclaim AI, they’ve somehow managed to make it worse.
14 Likes
Man, there are a ton of other great roasts in the replies.
13 Likes
So the guy who created this slop admitted to it and apologized for it, saying there was no excuse for it, but that obviously doesn’t absolve the news organization for being willing to buy and distribute this slop without checking it.
As willing as the guy is to accept 100% of the blame, there’s more than enough to spread around.
9 Likes
The 404 Media piece. What a shitshow the internet is so rapidly becoming!
Other articles in the Heat Index insert have what appear to be AI-generated sections as well. For example, in an article called “Hanging Out: Inside America’s growing hammock culture,” Buscaglia quotes “Dr. Jennifer Campos, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Colorado, in her 2023 research paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.” A search for Campos in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography does not return any results. While it’s not exactly clear why the AI said this, the only mention of “Jennifer Campos” on the University of Colorado’s website is about the graduation of a student named Jennifer Campos, who works in advertising. The same article also mentions a “2023 Outside Magazine interview” with Brianna Madia, the author of Nowhere for Very Long, a book about van life. “A hammock is basically my most essential piece of furniture,” Buscaglia quotes her as saying. Outside interviewed Madia in 2019, but hammocks were not discussed. Outside also did an article about her favorite van life gear in 2017, and she did not mention hammocks. The quote Buscaglia included does not show up on the internet outside of his own article. There are examples like this throughout the section, and several of them have been pointed out by the journalist Joshua J. Friedman on Bluesky.
11 Likes
“… was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom.”
They printed it, ipso facto they approved it.
13 Likes
And your Small and Medium Bens by the look of that Londiniumiumiumium.
11 Likes
AI generated slop reading lists?
I wish such a large proportion of those I see weren’t at this stage.
And not only student papers.
And not just undergrads.
And not just queries by faculty.
Oh no, I get queries from students looking for readings they can’t find, I reply “sorry but they are kind of like real articles in sometimes real journals by real sounding authors who somehow don’t exist on the LoC authorities or WorldCat or Google Scholar etc, because they are AI chum”.
So one of my students last year, bless them, wrote to the editor of a high ranking journal with a slop reading lists asking what was going on. They got a sniffy email back about how they have the highest standards of AI use. They also spammed me with stuff about how they were the most trusted scholarly society in their field and their policies.
Dude, I don’t care.
It’s slop. Slop everywhere.
10 Likes
8 Likes
7 Likes
8 Likes
Yeah because AI is working great so far 
but even if i were to make the assumption that it could work well is the huge energy footprint of AI worth it? It is if you don’t give a shit about carbon emissions.
12 Likes
6 Likes
Yeah but look at all the fuel no longer being used by those replaced commuting workers!
/s
8 Likes
A while back I heard an infuriating interview with Biden’s former “AI Czar” who was insisting that the US taking the lead in developing AI would be a great thing for the environment because the energy-intensive nature of AI was encouraging industry to find new renewable energy sources. So, you see, using more energy is somehow better than using less energy.
(It was also a frustrating interview because the guy had clearly bought into all the techbro fantasies about AI ushering a new golden age of productivity that will somehow help everyone rather than bury us all in AI-generated slop and cost people their jobs.)
11 Likes
Dogg Zzone 9000 - Episode 228, Clown Detective with Dennard Dayle
The DOGGZZONE welcomes back Dennard Dayle to the DOGGZZONE! Quick, name three sexy things. Don’t be shy… Correct! Clowns, Christians and beans. Heaving, gelatinous mouthfuls of steaming hot baked beans. BBQ if you’re nasty. Now, imagine a book that packs all three of these, (your favorite) erotic ingredients into a violent, (also hot) action/noir. An LLM hallucination that will leave you honking and horny, (on account of those sweet whore beans you see) it’s none other than Duane Laflin’s titillating tome, “The Party Is Over! (The Detective Was A Clown)”
3 Likes
Welp, I have just cancelled my Microsoft Office 365 recurring subscription.
Two reasons.
I only ever use it to check tracked changes to the copy edits on novels—once a year—which my publishers process in Word. As of this month, LibreOffice is good enough for the job (just tested at book length).
CoPilot in Office would open me up to accusations of breach of contract—my book contracts warrant that they’re all my own work: CoPilot brings that into question.
So good riddance to Office365!
Wonder how many people are leaving because the AI opens them up to legal issues, never mind just not wanting to use it.
18 Likes