The Chicago Sun-Times newspaper’s “Best of Summer” section published over the weekend contains a guide to summer reads that features real authors and fake books that they did not write was partially generated by artificial intelligence, the person who generated it told 404 Media.

The article, called “Summer Reading list for 2025,” suggests reading Tidewater by Isabel Allende, a “multigenerational saga set in a coastal town where magical realism meets environmental activism. Allende’s first climate fiction novel explores how one family confronts rising sea levels while uncovering long-buried secrets.” It also suggests reading The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, “another science-driven thriller” by the author of The Martian. “This time, the story follows a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness—and has been secretly influencing global events for years.” Neither of these books exist, and many of the books on the list either do not exist or were written by other authors than the ones they are attributed to. 

The article is not bylined but was written by Marco Buscaglia, whose name is on most of the other articles in the 64-page section. Buscaglia told 404 Media via email and on the phone that the list was AI-generated. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses,” he said. “On me 100 percent and I'm completely embarrassed.”

Buscaglia added “it’s a complete mistake on my part.”

“I assume I’ll be getting calls all day. I already am,” he said. “This is just idiotic of me, really embarrassed. When I found it [online], it was almost surreal to see.”

The AI-generated article was first noticed by Rachael King and was posted to Bluesky, where it quickly went viral.

404 Media bought a digital copy of the newspaper, which contains the 64-page, ad-supported “Heat Index,” which is nominally “your guide to the best of summer.” The entire section is, at the very least, incredibly generic. Having previously worked on Best of Summer packages at a local magazine (Washingtonian in Washington, D.C.), these types of guides are normally loaded with local events calendars, suggestions about new restaurants to try, outdoor movie nights to go to, and things like this. The Chicago Sun-Times’ guide has none of this. Buscaglia wrote the vast majority of the section, according to our review. 

Buscaglia said he did it as part of a “promotional special section” that is not supposed to be targeted to any specific city and is inserted into newspapers and other publications around the country. It is not specific to Chicago and was not intended to be, which helps explain why other articles in the section do not mention Chicago at all. Buscaglia said he had no idea it would end up in the Chicago Sun-Times and that he doesn’t know where else it will be published. “It’s supposed to be generic and national,” he said. “We never get a list of where things ran.”

Notably, the list of books shows some of the ouroboros of AI-generated content. Allende’s Tidewater Dreams definitely does not exist, but Google’s AI snippets says that it does, and attributes this to a list of Allende books from the Jefferson County Library, which does not list this “book” anywhere.

The Chicago Sun-Times did not respond to a request for comment, but in a Bluesky post it said “We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously. More info will be provided soon.”

BLUETTI’s new Apex 300 rethinks what a portable power station can be, combining grid-level output with the flexibility to go fully off-grid.

Designed for home backup, RV living, and remote energy independence, it offers plug-and-play simplicity with serious capacity and speed. The Apex 300 impressively supports dual 120V and 240V output, ultra-fast solar charging, and a first-of-its-kind 12,000W bypass with 0ms UPS switchover.

It’s efficient enough to stretch runtime far beyond typical units and powerful enough to run everything from powering a fridge to recharging an EV. Whether you’re prepping for outages or planning your next escape, Apex 300 can change the way you think about backup power.

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The season finale of the Apple TV+ hit comedy The Studio is set to release tomorrow. It won’t be long, however, until you’re able to fill that Seth Rogen void in your heart.

Apple TV+ has announced that season two of Platonic, its comedy starring Rogen alongside Rose Byrne, will debut on August 6.

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Save 15% on the UnionSine 500GB Ultra-Slim HDD for a limited time at Amazon.

On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times published an advertorial summer reading list containing at least 10 fake books attributed to real authors, according to multiple reports on social media. The newspaper's uncredited "Summer reading list for 2025" supplement recommended titles including "Tidewater Dreams" by Isabel Allende and "The Last Algorithm" by Andy Weir—books that don't exist and were likely created out of thin air by an AI system.

A check by Ars Technica shows that only five of the fifteen recommended books in the list actually exist, with the remainder being fabricated titles falsely attributed to well-known authors. AI assistants such as ChatGPT are well-known for creating plausible-sounding errors known as confabulations, especially when lacking detailed information on a particular topic. The problem affects everything from AI search results to lawyers citing fake cases.

On Tuesday morning, the Chicago Sun-Times addressed the controversy on Bluesky. "We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak," the official publication account wrote. "It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously. More info will be provided soon."

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AI software company Builder.ai is entering insolvency proceedings, a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. The Microsoft-backed unicorn, which has raised more than $450 million in funding, rose to prominence for its AI-based platform that aimed to simplify the process of building apps and websites. According to the spokesperson, Builder.ai, also known as Engineer.ai Corporation, is […]

Manus, the once-buzzy AI agent platform, on Tuesday launched a plan aimed at small businesses and organizations. The plan, dubbed Manus Team, starts at $39 per seat per month with a five-seat minimum, totaling $195 per month. Each team gets 19,500 credits in a sharable pool, as well as access to certain features in beta, […]

In the U.S., a number of startups aim to be the corporate spend manager of choice for small and large businesses. Brex, Ramp, and Mercury are among those companies, just to name a few. Moving north of the border to Canada, the options are fewer, but growing. Keep is a startup that has built a […]

Energizer's Colleen Orani on unifying a legacy brand's media structure.

Soon you’ll be able to charge your electric vehicle at Waffle House diners while chatting up truckers and dodging flying chairs. Starting in 2026, BP Pulse will be equipping America’s all-night breakfast place with 400kW DC fast chargers fitted with a mix of CCS and NACS connectors.

Participating Waffle House diners in Texas, Georgia, Florida, “and other locations in the South and Southeast” will each see six BP Pulse charging bays installed. There are over 2,000 Waffle Houses in 25 states, many of which are conveniently located near highway exits. BP Pulse chargers can already be found in over 8,000 retail locations in 46 states.

“Adding an iconic landmark like Waffle House to our growing portfolio of EV charging sites is such an exciting opportunity,” said BP Pulse CEO Sujay Sharma in a press release. “We’re building a robust network of ultrafast chargers across the country, and this is another example of third-party collaborations enabling access to charging co-located with convenient amenities for EV drivers.”

Civitai, an AI model sharing site backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is allowing users to AI generate nonconsensual porn of real people, despite the site’s policies against this type of content, increased moderation efforts, and threats from payment processors to deny Civitai service. 

After I reached out for comment about this issue, Civitai told me it fixed the site’s moderation “configuration issue” that allowed users to do this. After Civitai said it fixed this issue, its AI video generator no longer created noncosnensual videos of celebrities, but at the time of writing it is still allowing people to generate nonconsensual videos of non-celebrities.

404 Media saw people actively using Civitai AI video generation to create nonconsensual content, highlighting an inherent difficulty with Civitai and any generative AI tool that allows creating adult content: It is difficult if not impossible to prevent people from abusing those tools. 

In addition to allowing users to share AI image and video generation models that have been customized to render the likeness of real people or highly specific sex acts, Civitai also has an on-site AI image and video generator. Like many other generative AI tools, it allows users to type text prompts in order to produce images or videos. Civitai’s on-site generator can also use the many custom models the site hosts in order to generate media. 

Earlier in May, I reported about a Telegram bot that allowed users to generate nonconsensual short porn videos of anyone for a small price. Shortly after I published the story, Telegram banned the bot. After the bot was banned, one Telegram community dedicated to sharing nonconsensual AI generated porn started sharing other methods for generating the same type of videos without the bot. One user shared instructions for how to generate those types of videos, and other nonconsensual porn videos, on Civitai. 

“With 20 bucks i was able to make 30 5 second videos,” that user said on Telegram. 

I followed the simple instructions that user provided and was able to easily generate porn videos of anyone I had an image of. After providing an image, Civitai allows users to add “Additional Resources,” meaning custom AI models hosted on the site. When a user clicks this option, Civitai brings up a menu of AI models to choose from. The majority of the top models the user sees first are explicitly designed for creating porn. Some of these top models have titles like “Wan Cumshot,” “Wan POV Missionary,” “Wan Cowgirl,” and “Wan POV Blowjob.” Wan refers to the open-weights Alibaba developed AI model it’s based on. If the Civitai user changed their settings to allow “NSFW” content, these models show up first. 

To generate videos, Civitai users have to spend “Buzz,” the site's on-site currency that they can buy or earn by performing certain actions, like completing “Bounties.” Users can buy Buzz in bundles ranging from 5,000 Buzz for $5 to 40,000 Buzz for $40. The price of generations varies based on how long a video is and what “Additional Resources” it’s using, but all the generations I paid for cost between 400 to 600 Buzz. 

In April, Civitai introduced new rules and moderation efforts against nonconsensual content as well as a few other types of adult content after payment processors threatened to stop processing payments for Civitai unless it makes these changes. At the time, Civitai announced that it’s partnering with “Clavata, whose image ingestion and analysis system represents the most advanced and accurate solution we have encountered to-date. This new system will work in tandem with our in-house scanning tools to significantly improve the reliability of image tagging and rating.”

“Every video request now passes through two layers of review,” Civitai’s CEO Justin Maier told me in an email on Monday. “1. Pre-generation gate – If the seed image does not contain verifiable AI-generation metadata, the request is limited to a content level that prohibits sexual content and other mature themes. 2. Post-generation scan – Each video is then frame-scanned by Clavata under a custom policy that applies a content level (PG–XXX) and blocks anything that violates our Terms of Service, including CSAM, incest, or non-consensual likeness.”

Maier said that “The post-generation video scan was not firing as expected for a subset of requests. We identified and fixed the configuration issue within hours of your note.”

Maier did not immediately respond to a follow up question about why the site is still allowing users to generate nonconsensual content of random people and how the company plans to prevent this in the future. 

In 2023, I reported that Civitai was generating images that “could be categorized as child pornography,” according to OctoML, the company that was helping it generate images on the backend. After 404 Media published that story, OctoML dropped Civitai as a client, and Civitai introduced new guardrails to prevent people from generating nonconsensual content on-site. One basic measure Civitai introduced made it so its on-site AI image generator would refuse to generate prompts that described celebrities in sexual scenarios. After this change, for example, the image generator refused to generate an image of “Taylor Swift nude.”

Our previous reporting showed that “image-to-video” tools are currently harder to moderate. It’s much easier to filter out text like “Taylor Swift” and refuse to generate images that include that phrase in a written prompt than it is to detect whether the likeness of a celebrity is included in an image a user is trying to animate. Additionally, there’s no practical way I’m aware of to filter out the likeness of non-celebrities. The only surefire way of preventing people from generating nonconsensual sexual videos on a platform like Civitai is preventing them from generating any type of adult content, period. 

In 2023, 404 Media first reported that Civitai had raised $5.1 million in a seed funding round led by a16z. The investment is notable not only because Civitai took money from one of the most influential venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, but because according to a 2024 transparency report, Maier said that while revenue is growing, the company is still “operating at a loss.”

According to that report, with the exception of salaries, most of the site’s expenses are in “GPUs: Providing generation, training, and content labeling services.” In other words, the company spent $1.2 million, or 22.40 percent of its total spend, mostly on generating media. Most of the revenue came from generation as well. $1.7 million or 80.31 percent of its revenue came from “onsite image and video inference using Yellow Buzz.”

“We haven't had any more rounds of investment since our Seed round with a16z,” Maier told me. “Civitai is currently self-sustaining on product revenue.”

Elon Musk said Tuesday he’s committed to leading electric-vehicle maker Tesla for at least the next five years. He made the comment during an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum in Abu Dhabi.  “Yes, no doubt about that at all,” […]

The post Elon Musk commits to leading Tesla for the next five years amid challenges and optimism first appeared on Tech Startups.

After teasing it earlier this month, the Nothing Phone (3) now has an official release window, with the device launching in July 2025.

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Overcast, the hit podcast app developed by Marco Arment, has been updated today with a vastly improved Apple Watch app. This update follows Overcast’s major revamp last summer, which brought an all-new design in celebration of its tenth anniversary.

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Samsung’s flagship gaming monitor looks incredible, but it might be too much for some people.

Jurassic World Rebirth is coming to theaters for the Fourth of July weekend, and Universal Pictures has released one final trailer to whet audience appetites for the film.

As previously reported, this is the fourth installment in the Jurassic World series and seventh film overall in the franchise spawned by 1993's Jurassic Park. This time around, Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali step into the leading roles since the film is meant to be a fresh start for the franchise—although it does feature a return to the original research facility. Gareth Edwards—who directed 2014's Godzilla—signed on to direct a script penned by David Koepp, who wrote the scripts for Jurassic Park and The Lost World (1997).

Per the official premise:

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Amazon’s autonomous vehicle unit Zoox is about to start mapping and gathering data in Atlanta, Georgia, a precursor to testing its self-driving vehicles and eventually offering public rides in the city. Atlanta will become the seventh city in the U.S. where Zoox is testing its vehicles. The company announced its testing plans just one day […]

Google DeepMind is at the forefront of AI innovation, and no one is more poised to speak to this than Senior Product Manager Logan Kilpatrick. We are pleased to announce he will be joining us on the main stage at TechCrunch Sessions: AI, happening June 5th at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. TC Sessions: AI is […]

Amazon Music announced Tuesday that it’s testing a new AI-powered search feature called “Explore,” designed to help fans learn more about their favorite artists.  To use this feature, users can tap the “Find” button at the bottom of the screen and enter an artist’s name in the search bar. Then, by selecting the “Explore” tab […]