Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books

Reference librarian Eddie Kristan said lenders at the library where he works have been asking him to find books that don’t exist without realizing they were hallucinated by AI ever since the release of GPT-3.5 in late 2022. But the problem escalated over the summer after fielding patron requests for the same fake book titles from real authors—the consequences of an AI-generated summer reading list circulated in special editions of the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year. At the time, the freelancer told 404 Media he used AI to produce the list without fact checking outputs before syndication.