Lunch had been a handful of cashews, munched in the car on my way to Pullman to listen to 6th grade girls talk about their lives.
Now it was 2 p.m., heading home and, glory be, a White Castle ahead on 111th Street. I pulled into the drive-thru line.
Should I order two cheese sliders or three? I have my svelte figure to consider, so called up whatever AI helpmate crouches on my iPhone, like a troll under a bridge, and asked: how many calories in a White Castle cheese slider? Answer: 340.
Hmm. I thought. That isn’t right. The true figure had to be fewer — a McDonald’s cheeseburger is about 300 — and ordered two. Which, later exploration determined, was what AI had in mind. White Castle considers a pair of sliders to be one serving. Hence the mistake. It was as if I asked AI for the price of a single shoe.
The “this isn’t right” reflex is hard to teach a computer, apparently, given the glaring wrongness artificial intelligence routinely serves up — the six-fingered hands and uncanny valley fake people who are somehow off, a little or a lot.
That reflex should have kicked in for anyone reading the “Heat Wave” section jammed into the Sunday paper. The special section was produced by an outside vendor, King Features, and handled by the Sun-Times circulation department. Someone missed the AI-generated imaginary book titles in the “Summer reading list” on page 62.
Not AI, but human failure. Someone apparently read the section’s painfully generic listicles without thinking, “This is embarrassing.”
A summer reading list that appeared in a Sun-Times syndicated special section included AI-generated misinformation.
Or maybe no one read it at all. That’s being investigated. Someone dropped the ball. And when trusted people don’t do their jobs in newspapering, catastrophe can result, as happened here. The good name of the Chicago Sun-Times, dragged backward through the mud, coast to coast.
Sunday I had missed the section entirely. Wrapped in the funnies, it went unseen directly to our recycling pile. Monday passed without remark.
On Tuesday morning, Bluesky started snickering, with trolls joining hands and dancing in a gleeful circle, chanting. The Sun-Times was damned for cutbacks, damned for laying off staffers. I’m surprised nobody mentioned Wingo.
I phoned Marco Buscaglia, whose name is all over the section, because I wanted to see if he too wasn’t illusionary. He’s not, but a very real person, an affable veteran Chicago journalist. Illinois State University graduate. Four kids. He took full blame, which I respected. But the true shame isn’t the imagined books he yawned into print, but the rest of the section: generic pap that showed no distinctiveness or human touch.
“45. Enjoy an ice cream cone from a local shop.” Hold the presses.
Forty years ago, I wrote for one of those inserts, my first contact with the paper. Freelancing for the “School Guide.” I can still recall certain stories. A professor studying why fish don’t freeze in sub-zero arctic waters. An IIT class for train engineers, putting them at the controls of a real locomotive in a darkened room, the passing landscape projected on a screen. I was proud of those articles, then and now.
Pride can’t be taught to a machine. AI represents the latest manifestation of something that has always plagued journalism: the lure of the bland, the seduction of the generic, the comfort of the pre-digested and risk-free.
I wish I could say the answer is to avoid AI. But AI is here, a fact of life that can’t be wished away. I could pronounce myself AI-free, like those diehards sticking to their typewriters as word processors swept newsrooms in the 1980s.
That’s a pose. As if to disabuse me of that notion, I tripped over AI on my Wednesday column and didn’t even know it.
I had plugged “statues of real women in Chicago” into Prof. Google and the first entry was “The Jane Addams memorial sculpture, ‘Helping Hands,’ by Louise Bourgeois, is in Chicago Women’s Park.” Which worked for me.
Careless.
Because the Addams sculpture isn’t of Addams, but of various disembodied hands. I missed that. A producer from WTTW pointed it out Wednesday morning. Luckily, I had also missed the Lorraine Hansberry sculpture unveiled at Navy Pier last September. So a swap: out with Helping Hands, in with the author of “A Raisin in the Sun.” We fix stuff all the time — ideally before publication; sometimes after.
Every story selected, every writer assigned, every word set down or excised, is a choice, an exercise in judgment. Each day the result of those decisions pops up online and is tossed on doorsteps. The result is never perfect, but as close to perfect as we can make it. Last Sunday was an organizational failure. But there were many Sundays before, and hopefully, many Sundays to come. We’ll do better.
