AI chatbots are generating fake titles that people insist are real.
Falls suggests that people don’t seem to believe librarians when they explain that a given record doesn’t exist
This happened to me at my job, someone called in asking about something that didn’t exist and never did, and insisted with me that I was mistaken when I said we didn’t have it. When I asked where they got their information they said “ChatGPT” and when I suggested GPT was hallucinating they didn’t seem to understand the term.
Having that exchange IRL with a real human bring honestly kind of shook me up.
More propaganda from Big Library. I know you have that book, Linda!
“The 911 JFK Flat Moon Landing at Area 51: How the Reptilian CIA Used the Fake Holocaust to Create the COVID Delusion for Autism, and You’re the Smartest Goodest Boy for Being Correct about Having Secret Knowledge Despite the Fact that It’s Based on Information that Everyone in the Whole World Has Access to.”
Barnes & Noble’s parent company already addressed this, though. The concern was raised that if AI was used to write books, they would not be allowed to sell them or there would be controversy there. The parent company said their job was simply distribution and management, they would leave it up to local shop managers to decide what to display and where.
So yes, it’s the other side (real books made by genAI, as opposed to titles of books that don’t exist hallucinated by chatbots), but still kind of the same issue. Books actually written by genAI and published would be given an ISBN and you’d be able to look it up, same as a book written by a human. Titles that are hallucinated could be debunked by checking the same ISBN system, which is open, so ChatGPT and the like should be checking it. Of course, ISBN does not index fan fiction, and may not even index popular fan fiction, such as The North Remembers, the 500k±word story that finishes A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones books) after the author abandoned the series. Or that one popular Harry Potter fic people like. Of course, it would index fan fiction that gets published traditionally, such as the “50 Shades of Grey” series (which started out as Twilight fan fiction). And human-created slop that, like genAI slop, pieces together stuff made by other humans, like Eragon did.
