Chicago Newspaper Caught Publishing a “Summer Reads” Guide Full of AI Slop

AI Chat - Image Generator:

The Chicago Sun-Times, a daily non-profit newspaper owned by Chicago Public Media, published a “summer reading list” featuring wholly fabricated books — the result of broadcasting unverified AI slop in its pages.

An image of a “Summer reading list for 2025” was first shared to Instagram by a book podcaster who goes by Tina Books and was circulated on Bluesky by the novelist Rachael King. The newspaper’s title and the date of the page’s publication are visible in the page’s header.

The page was included in a 64-page “Best of Summer” feature, and as the author, Marco Buscaglia, told 404 Media, it was generated using AI.

“I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first,” Buscaglia told 404 Media. “This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses.”

“On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed,” he added.

At first glance, the list is unassuming.

“Whether you’re lounging by the pool, relaxing on sandy shores or enjoying the longer daylight hours in your favorite reading spot,” reads the list’s introduction, “these 15 titles — new and old — promise to deliver the perfect summer escape.”

The book titles themselves are unassuming, too. The newspaper recommends titles like the ethereal-sounding “Tidewater Dreams,” which it says was written by the Chilean-American novelist Isabel Allende; “The Last Algorithm,” purported to be a new sci-fi thriller by Andy Weir; and “The Collector’s Piece,” said to be written by the writer Taylor Jenkins Reid about a “reclusive art collector and the journalist determined to uncover the truth behind his most controversial acquisition.”

But as we independently confirmed, though these authors are real and well-known, these books are entirely fake — as are several others listed on the page. Indeed: the first ten out of all fifteen titles listed in the Sun-Times list either don’t exist at all, or the titles are real, but weren’t written by the author that the Sun-Times attributes them to.

Fabrications like made-up citations are commonplace in AI-generated content, and a known risk of using generative AI tools like ChatGPT.

We reached out to the Sun-Times and its owner, Chicago Public Media, which notably also owns the beloved National Public Radio station WBEZ Chicago. In an email, a spokesperson emphasized that the content wasn’t created or approved by the Sun-Times newsroom and that the paper was actively investigating.

“We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak,” read the email. “This is licensed content that was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom, but it is unacceptable for any content we provide to our readers to be inaccurate. We value our readers’ trust in our reporting and take this very seriously. More info will be provided soon as we investigate.”

This was echoed by Buscaglia, who told 404 Media that the content was created to be part of a “promotional special section” not specifically targeted to Chicago.

“It’s supposed to be generic and national,” Buscaglia told 4o4 Media. “We never get a list of where things ran.”

This wouldn’t be the first time AI has been used to create third-party content and published without AI disclosures by journalistic institutions, as Futurism’s investigation last year into AdVon Commerce revealed.

Readers are understandably upset and demanding answers.

“How did the editors at the Sun-Times not catch this? Do they use AI consistently in their work?” reads a Reddit post to r/Chicago about the scandal.  “As a subscriber, I am livid!”

“What is the point of subscribing to a hard copy paper,” the poster continued, “if they are just going to include AI slop too!?”

“I just feel an overwhelming sense of sadness this morning over this?” University of Minnesota Press editorial director Jason Weidemann wrote in a Bluesky post. “There are thousands of struggling writers out there who could write a brilliant summer reads feature and should be paid to do so.”

“Pay humans to do things for fuck’s sake,” he added.

More on AI and journalism: Scammers Stole the Website for Emerson College’s Student Radio Station and Started Running It as a Zombie AI Farm

The post Chicago Newspaper Caught Publishing a “Summer Reads” Guide Full of AI Slop appeared first on Futurism.

Gannett Is Using AI to Pump Brainrot Gambling Content Into Newspapers Across the Country

AI Chat - Image Generator:
The media giant Gannett is using AI to "automatically generate" content about lottery scores and tickets in local newspapers across the US.

The media giant Gannett, the largest owner of American local newspapers and the publisher of USA Today, is using AI to churn out a nationwide torrent of automated articles about lottery results that often pointedly direct readers toward a gambling site with which Gannett has a financial relationship, giving the company a financial kickback when readers visit it.

Gannett appears to have started publishing the automated gambling posts around February of this year, with the articles published en masse by dozens of local newspapers across many US states — an eyebrow-raising editorial move, especially during an explosive rise in gambling addiction that Gannett itself has covered extensively.

In many cases, the posts are outfitted with vague bylines, attributed to simply a paper’s “Staff” or “Staff reports.” Other times, the posts are attributed to a Gannett editor or digital producer, suggesting at first glance that the articles were written by humans.

Until you get to the foot of each post, that is.

Though the information provided varies slightly from post to post and state to state, the content is extremely formulaic. And at the very bottom of each post, there’s a similar disclaimer that each “results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu” — a compiler of lottery data with a website straight out of web 1.0 — and a “template” that was “written and reviewed” by a Gannett journalist in a given market.

Take a recent post about Illinois Powerball Pick 3 results, published May 7 in The Peoria Journal Star. The article is bylined by a longtime Gannett employee named Chris Sims, who’s listed on LinkedIn as a digital producer for the newspaper giant.

At the bottom of the article is the disclaimer fessing up to the use of automation technology to churn out the article, as well as the claim that AI was used in tandem with a template “written and reviewed by an Illinois editor”:

This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by an Illinois editor. You can send feedback using this form. Our News Automation and AI team would love to hear from you. Take this survey and share your thoughts with us.

That editor would have to be Sims. Right? After all, why else would a journalistic institution slap a journalist’s name at the top of an article, if not to insinuate that said journalist was directly involved in its writing or reviewing?

But further digging muddies the water. Sims’ opening line — emphasis ours — reads as follows:

The Illinois Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at May 7, 2025, results for each game.

Simple, but direct — and presumably from a template written by Sims, if the disclaimer is to be believed.

But here’s the opening line from another, similar post about the May 7 Powerball drawings over in Texas, which was published by the Gannett-owned newspaper The El Paso Times and bylined by a different Gannett journalist named Maria Cortes Gonzalez:

The Texas Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at May 7, 2025, results for each game.

Gonzalez works for an entirely different market from Sims. And though the opening lines of each article are nearly identical, the disclaimer listed at the bottom of the Gonzalez-bylined article claims that it was “generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a Texas editor,” and not an editor from Illinois.

The pattern continues over in Colorado, where an article published by The Coloradoan about the May 7 Colorado Powerball results features the same lede:

The Colorado Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at May 7, 2025, results for each game.

In this instance, the Coloradoan article was simply attributed to “Coloradoan Staff.” Its disclaimer, however, names yet another Gannett employee as author of the post’s template, declaring that the “results page” was generated using TinBu data and a “template written and reviewed by Fort Collins Coloradoan planner Holly Engelman.”

The pattern continues at newspapers across the country, from California, to Georgia, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and beyond. (It’s also worth pointing out that all winning numbers can be found by googling the name of a state and “lottery numbers,” meaning the articles are providing zero original value that can’t be found with a simple web search.)

Some of the posts go further than simply providing lottery results, and offer extra information on where and how to purchase tickets — and often recommend that readers shop lotto stubs from an online platform called Jackpocket, which struck a deal with Gannett in 2023 and is referred to in many automatically-generated Gannett articles as the “official digital lottery courier of the USA TODAY Network.” Jackpocket, which is owned by the digital gambling giant DraftKings, recently came under investigation in Texas after a massive lottery win drew lawmaker scrutiny over the fairness of tickets bought through the third-party lottery platform.

To say that mixing automated journalism with SEO-targeted lottery articles that generate revenue when readers become gamblers themselves is pushing the limits of editorial ethics is putting it mildly, especially given the muddiness of the template attributions.

When we contacted Gannett for comment, the company confirmed through a spokesperson that it uses a “natural language generation” tool to produce the articles.

Regarding the similarities between articles across regions, the spokesperson said that a singular Gannett journalist drafted an original template and distributed it across markets, where market editors edited the draft as they saw fit. The spokesperson also denied that bylining the automated articles with the names of editorial staffers might be misleading to readers, arguing that including the editorial bylines encourages transparency, and stated that all of the automated posts are double-checked by humans before publishing.

Gannett also maintained that the articles are editorial — and not advertorial, as the links to Jackpocket might suggest. The spokesperson claimed that the lottery provider wasn’t involved in the creation of any of the content we found, and affiliate links were only added in states where Jackpocket, which isn’t available in all 50 states, legally operates.

In a written statement, the spokesperson doubled down on Gannett’s commitment to automation.

“By leveraging automation in our newsroom, we are able to expand coverage and enable our journalists to focus on more in-depth reporting,” the spokesperson told us in a statement. “With human oversight at every step, this reporting meets our high standards for quality and accuracy to provide our audiences more valuable content which they’ve always associated with Gannett and the USA TODAY Network.”

The disclosure that appears on the articles — “Gannett may earn revenue for audience referrals to Jackpocket services” — seems to imply that not all gambling articles earn money when readers start gambling. A spokesperson didn’t clarify.

This is hardly Gannett’s first brush with AI content.

Back in June of 2023, the company’s chief product officer, Renn Turiano, told Reuters that Gannett planned to experiment with AI, though he swore that it would do so responsibly — and, importantly, would avoid publishing content “automatically, without oversight.” But those promises quickly unraveled, and in August, USA Today, The Columbus Dispatch, and other Gannett papers were caught publishing horrendously sloppy AI-generated write-ups about local high school sports scores. It was an embarrassment for the publisher, which was forced to issue mass corrections.

Then, in September of 2023, Gannett came under fire once again after journalists at the company’s since-shuttered commerce site, Reviewed, publicly accused its owner of publishing AI-generated shopping content bylined by fake writers. At the time, Gannett defended the content; it claimed that it hadn’t been created using AI, but had been written by freelancers who worked for a third-party media contractor identified as AdVon Commerce.

A months-long Futurism investigation into AdVon later revealed that the company was using a proprietary AI tool to generate content for its many publishing clients, including Gannett, Sports Illustrated, many local newspapers belonging to the McClatchy media network, and more — and bylined its content with fake writers with AI-generated headshots and made-up bios designed to give the bogus content more perceived legitimacy. (AdVon has contested our reporting, but our investigation found many discrepancies in its account.)

Gannett also caused controversy amongst staffers last year when it updated contracts to allow for the use of AI to generate “news content,” and has since rolled out an AI tool that summarizes articles into bullet points.

And now, with its mass-generated lottery content, it seems that the publisher’s AI train has continued to chug right along. After Gannett’s many AI controversies — and the copious AI journalism scandals we’ve seen in the publishing industry writ large — automated, SEO-targeted lottery updates feel like the logical next stop.

Update: This article incorrectly attributed an article published in the Gannett-owned newspaper The El Paso Times to The Austin American-Statesman, and said that The Austin American-Statesman was owned by Gannett. The Austin American-Statesman was sold by Gannett to Hearst in February 2025.

More on Gannett and AI: Gannett Sports Writer on Botched AI-Generated Sports Articles: “Embarrassing”

The post Gannett Is Using AI to Pump Brainrot Gambling Content Into Newspapers Across the Country appeared first on Futurism.