The book by Isabel Allende that you won't read

The scent of summer is beginning to appear, and some media outlets are publishing supplements with holiday suggestions. This is what theChicago Sun-Times when he dedicated a page to making a dozen literary recommendations. Among the authors he suggested were Isabel Allende, Percival Everett, and Maggie O'Farrell. But there was a problem: none of the books he recommended by those novelists existed, since the freelance that had been paid for the article had been done by asking for help from an artificial intelligence tool. From then on, we'll never know why the app didn't do what it always does—steal content without attributing it—and instead opted to start inventing imaginary books, plausible enough for each author. I don't believe AI has a conscience, at least not at the current state of technological development, but seeing it commit the classic, venial, and very human sins of wanting to appear more cultured than it actually is is both disturbing and endearing.

I admit, therefore, that the machine generates in me an empathy that not even the freelance Neither the con man nor the editors who didn't do a minimum of checking can attract attention. Artificial intelligence tools can be very useful for synthesizing information scattered across the internet, but serving this information to the reader without verifying it is a high-risk sport. And it's also shooting yourself in the foot, since instead of vindicating the still-necessary human participation in intellectual work, you blindly delegate one of the most precious assets you can display as a competitive advantage over the digital parrots of repetition: judgment. You only have to have messed around with AI a little to know that they would let you rip out three chips before admitting they don't know something, which often leads them to speculate. Or, as Seneca said, "never trust a quote given to you by ChatGPT."