Newspapers and magazines love a ‘listicle’ in the run-up to Christmas, but CIO.com’s 10 Famous AI Disasters from December 2025 isn’t probably one that any publishing industry Chief Information Security Officer wanted to read due to two particularly eyebrow-raising AI-related editorial cock-ups.
Chicago Sun-Times, Philadelphia Inquirer publish summer reading list of fake books
May 2025 editions of both publications contained AI-generated ‘listicles’ of hallucinated books that didn’t exist, including, to make matters worse, some that were attributed to real-life authors.
Sports Illustrated may have published AI-generated writers
An investigation by Futurism in November 2023 uncovered Sports Illustrated’s practice of outsourcing content creation and just trusting that the authors’ contributions were genuine, without actually checking. Author headshots were available for sale on an AI-generated stock image website.
Now, it’d be facetious to suggest they could have prevented this from happening by having Klyra Shield running in the editorial teams’ browsers, because this very simple but powerful AI compliance monitoring and governance tool was a twinkle in its creators’ eyes at the time of their cock-ups, but if they had had it, they almost certainly wouldn’t have covered themselves in embarrassment like that.
Get in touch if you’d like to find out more about Klyra Shield, organise a demo or move straight to initiating a short guided trial – colin@mondatum.com.