The AI Book Recommendation List Isn't About AI

Plus: Chinese TikToks in NYT Magazine

The discourse lamp has been lit by the Chicago Sun Times’ running an AI-generated summer reading list that includes a few books that don’t exist, including The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir which is a shame because I honestly would have read that. (It would be very funny if an author on this list ended up being like, wait that’s a good idea for a book I’m using that.) I particularly enjoyed

Christian Lorentzen

’s take that this is the final evolution of book recommendation lists, a sort of proto-slop geared towards the incurious who wanted to be told what to enjoy. “Now we have such lists in their ultimate form: a list written by nobody for readers who don’t care consisting mostly of books that do not and will never exist,” he writes.

Speaking as someone who has been deep inside the belly of commercial media, my immediate reaction was that the list itself had the look and feel of, if not totally bought and paid for advertorial, then at least a low-quality insert produced for easy distribution. And indeed it was. Apparently the list was made by King Features, a subsidiary of Hearst that syndicates comics, essays, and opinion pieces to the media company’s vast collection of newspapers and websites. The guy who wrote the book rec list, Marco Buscaglia, doesn’t work for the Chicago Sun-Times but for King, which then sends the insert out to the in-network papers who can slot it in where they please. (I also very much feel for Buscaglia who is the rare type who admitted immediately and without caveat that he fucked up.)

I think one funny thing about the constant conversation around ‘slop’ is that a lot of people act as if this is a new thing. The scale absolutely is, as the internet can now effectively make all this shit on its own like a perpetual pulp machine, but it’s not as if the idea of widely distributed garbage is totally novel. I’d argue that this whole blow up says a lot more about the impacts of media consolidation than anything particularly damning about AI. It hasn’t ‘broken contain’ as many people have panicked about, people are just using a new tool to do what they’ve always done. I think in the desire for to identify something as totally of our own time, we lose track of where the headwaters of our current predicament are. When a massive company like Hearst consolidates its news outlet holdings and then streamlines them, quality gets disincentivized in favor of efficiency¹.

This is basically the story of the media ecosystem in the 21st century. Private equity firms saw inefficiencies and wanted to take advantage of them. Consider something like an advertising team at a small-market newspaper. Maybe you have a dozen people working in the department and they’re hitting their numbers like clockwork. If you’re a PE firm spying for an investment, maybe you look at that paper and then the 20 other papers in the region and decide that, hey, instead of 240 people running ad sales across these outlets, we buy up all of them and cut that team in half and they can syndicate their sales to an entire ad network. That means 120 salaries worth of profit right off the bat². It doesn’t need to work forever, it just needs to work for as long as the fund’s maturity timeline.

And that’s how you end up with pulpy drivel like the summer reading list. The panic about this being how AI finally seeps into cultural consciousness or how it’s going to destroy whatever is left of trust in media are lukewarm takes meant to take advantage of whatever current discourse thermals people want to ride on. It’s old, consolidated news.

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Speaking of technology, I wrote about how social media is rewiring how people talk to one another for The New York Times Magazine last weekend. One of the best things about this essay was that I got to reconnect with two Chinese colleagues who I haven’t talked to in many years, and they had the most thoughtful, nuanced takes on the interpersonal rather than international relationships between Chinese and American citizens. It made me feel, however briefly, that social media could be beneficial in creating direct connections between people outside of national communications channels. Propaganda will always seep in, of course, but I think there’s something really wonderful and hopeful about how young people are talking directly to one another instead of believing everything their governments want them to believe.

1. Hearst is funny this way, of course, because it was sort of the ur-media consolidator. But what has changed in the last 30 years is the business philosophy behind buying up as much as you can in a given industry. William Randolph Hearst wanted newspapers because of the political clout, but now its much of an advertising efficiency play to see how revenue you can squeeze out of a given outlet while minimizing overhead, which is exactly the private equity playbook.

2. You can replace newspapers with digital media and activate most of my generation’s trauma response.