There's a whole lot of this throughout the entire Sun-Times Summer 2025 section, I can't find most of the people or publications referred to or quoted in any of this (some of the publications exist but i can't find the cited people in them)
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Someone on here said the Philadelphia Inquirer also ran the same "summer reads" list. Beginning to suspect there's some 3rd party contractor shopping cheap "summer sections" to a lot of papers.
The Sun Times is already out denying any responsibility for the thing printed in their own paper 🤣🤣. But that could mean some corporate honcho further up the food chain slipped it in without any oversight. https://bsky.app/profile/chicago.suntimes.com/post/3lpmbnluszc2a
Not likely, since the Sun-Times is a nonprofit owned by the same organization as the local NPR affiliate. My money says it was greenlit by someone in advertising.
That's a shame. I didn't know it was a non-profit, which seems like a great way to preserve the quality local journalism newspapers used to provide to communities. You hate to see their credibility undermined by something like this.
Agreed. In my old newsroom the ad side did a ton of "special" sections like this where they generated the copy and it was only edited if they specifically asked us to look at it. No excuse but I can definitely see how it might've happened.
You would think, but then how come the entire 64-page section has only two non-house ads? The copy itself doesn't seem to be promoting any specific brands or products, so what's the point of it all?
The purpose of supplementals is usually to create more ad holes. The purpose of the advertorial content is to have something appearing next to the ads.
I check that one too, and found no Catherine and no food anthropology specialization. If I wasn’t retired I would have a grand time using AI to create a new resume. I’d be very very important, highly-skilled, and overqualified for everything!
Like what you saw may have been as poor, but someone thought it was something. Maybe even clever! They were wrong, but they didn’t realize it, and could! Potentially.
No one thought anything about this line. By definition, it is more vapid than anything that could BE written.
Big part of dumbing down our entire society. Train LLMs on text messages and social media, and it bleeds even into autocorrect and dictation algorithms. Dictation used to be able to handle medical terms, but now it's basic rule is "more popular over correct" and it decorrects your correct grammar.
and of course this feeds into itself, every time a writer fails to catch the mistake, the algorithm reinforces that it's good and preferred. We are going to literally lose vocabulary in under a generation.
truly incredible that their bsky bio says "the hardest working paper in america." by what POSSIBLE metric, when a robot is (poorly) doing your work for you?
My first worst-case reflex was Vranyo, then philosophically even in context of Deza & Hannah Arendt.
But on second thought, it fits Tufta even better, for fulfilling the demand of pagefills, clickbait & revenue, by media corporations.
To be clear, the people running the social media account doesn't know where it came from ... obviously, someone does. Now it's a question of whether this is 1-2 people committing an ethical breach without decision maker's knowledge, or an organizational ethical breach that was decided in meetings.
The writing style is pure AI too. Such stilted overly-formal language for a culture fluff piece! It sounds just like Grok talking about white genocide, the same overly-centrist “lots of trends happening on all sides” language applied to summer food.
There's something so darkly funny about AI software coming for writing jobs by generating text that also implies jobs like "chief editor at https://FirePitBase.com" exist
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https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/
This is so bad.
I mean… God.
Like what you saw may have been as poor, but someone thought it was something. Maybe even clever! They were wrong, but they didn’t realize it, and could! Potentially.
No one thought anything about this line. By definition, it is more vapid than anything that could BE written.
But on second thought, it fits Tufta even better, for fulfilling the demand of pagefills, clickbait & revenue, by media corporations.
Tufta: 'Fake data to meet a plan'.
https://bsky.app/profile/wilhelmusjanus.bsky.social/post/3lpqnzwlbhs2b
https://www.wbez.org/reset-with-sasha-ann-simons/2022/01/20/chicago-public-media-acquires-chicago-sun-times