Viral AI-Generated Summer Guide Printed by Chicago Sun

The “Heat Index” summer guide newspaper insert published by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer that contained AI-generated misinformation and reading lists full of books that don’t exist was created by a subsidiary of the magazine giant Hearst, 404 Media has learned.

Victor Lim, the vice president of marketing and communications at Chicago Public Media, which owns the Chicago Sun-Times, told 404 Media in a phone call that the Heat Index section was licensed from a company called King Features, which is owned by the magazine giant Hearst. He said that no one at Chicago Public Media reviewed the section and that historically it has not reviewed newspaper inserts that it has bought from King Features.

“Historically, we don’t have editorial review from those mainly because it’s coming from a newspaper publisher, so we falsely made the assumption there would be an editorial process for this,” Lim said. “We are updating our policy to require internal editorial oversight over content like this.”

King Features syndicates comics and columns such as Car Talk, Hints from Heloise, horoscopes, and a column by Dr. Oz to newspapers, but it also makes special inserts that newspapers can buy and put into their papers. King Features calls itself a "unit of Hearst."

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