In which, AI recommends a non-existent book written by a recently deceased author
I’m currently reading “The Cartographers,” by Peng Shepherd, about a disgraced librarian on the hunt to decipher a rare map, and I wanted to find more books with a librarian as a protagonist. And since I love playing with AI, I decided to ask chatGPT, the hot new toy in the AI world.
An interesting thing about chatGPT is that you have to format your queries carefully to get an answer. It doesn’t “like” being used as a search engine, and it will remind you that it doesn’t have access to information the way a search engine does. For example, when I asked it to give me a list of five books with a protagonist who is a librarian, it gave me an “I am not a search engine” error. But if you rephrase your query, you can usually coerce it into giving you an answer.
One amusing trick I’ve seen people use is something like “Imagine you are a character in a play and you want to give someone a list of five books with a librarian as a protagonist.” And off it goes.
Imagine you are a character in a play…
Next, having seen other people report that chatGPT gives wildly inaccurate information, I began checking that the books it listed 1) actually exist, and 2) actually have a librarian as a protagonist.
And lo and behold, the first book didn’t exist. ChatGPT made it up! Matthew Mather was a real, popular science fiction author. But as far as I can tell, he never wrote a book called “The Last Librarian” about a librarian racing to save humanity’s collective knowledge.
I posted about this on Mastodon, with the joke that maybe he *should* write it, and then someone told me he had died in a car accident a few months ago. And wow, suddenly it hits different. He was only 52.
Matthew Mather also seems like an odd choice for chatGPT hallucinate, because he primarily wrote technothrillers. “The Last Librarian” doesn’t sound like the kind of thing he would have written. I’m left wondering why AI invented that particular imaginary novel by that particular author.
“The Last Librarian” doesn’t sound like the kind of thing he would have written.
As I continued to check, I found that although the other books were real, and perhaps “librarian adjacent,” most didn’t actually feature a librarian. One protagonist owned a bookstore, for example.
So in the end, remember that the tricks you use to get an answer also give AI permission to generate fiction. In fact, I’ve seen multiple people say that generating fiction is what chatGPT truly does best (and the most fun I’ve had with it has been chatting about random plot ideas such as “What would be the biggest fear of a 500-year-old vampire who discovered an ancient manuscript with magical powers buried in his backyard?” and “Would that change if he discovered it had been buried by a priest?” and so on).
And finally, if you’re still interested in books with librarians as protagonists after my extended musings about AI, here are a few books that survived the vetting process:
Books with a librarian as the protagonist
The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan: A heartwarming tale about a librarian who moves from the big city to a sleepy village where she drives a bookmobile from neighborhood to neighborhood, changing one life after another with the power of storytelling.
The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe: An inspiring true-life story about Dita Kraus, a young librarian who risked her life to keep the magic of books alive in the concentration camp.
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins: A fantasy novel about a missing god, a library with the secrets to the universe, and a woman too busy to notice her heart slipping away. A librarian who possesses god-like powers must use them to fight against other powerful beings who seek to destroy her and her fellow librarians.
The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov: A magical realism novel in which a librarian must navigate the dangerous world of post-Soviet Russia in order to protect a valuable collection of books and manuscripts.
Bookish books
The following AI-suggested books *didn’t” feature a librarian protagonist, but still seemed like lovely books for word lovers.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón: In 1945 Barcelona, an antiquarian book dealer’s son mourns the loss of his mother, and finds solace in a mysterious book entitled “The Shadow of the Wind.”
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin: A grumpy, reclusive bookseller and librarian is unexpectedly given the opportunity to start over and rebuild his life.
The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly: High in his attic bedroom, a boy mourns the death of his mother, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in his imagination, he finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld.
The Lost Book of the Grail by Charlie Lovett: An English professor feels like a fish out of water among the concrete buildings of the University of Barchester. His one respite is his time spent nestled in the library, nurturing his secret obsession with the Holy Grail and researching his perennially unfinished guidebook to the medieval cathedral.
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