I received an email requesting an essay I wrote in 2011. Not unusual: while publishers charge lots of money for academic journals, most of us are happy to give away copies for free of our own publications. Print journals used to give (maybe still do?) extra offset copies for precisely that purpose. What was odd, however, was that I could not at all remember the piece named.

It was early, maybe my brain just hadn’t woken up–after all, it was a while ago and back when I used to publish and write a lot. But hmmmm…

I checked my bibliography first. While imperfect as all human-made things are, it’s generally been the one place I made sure to add things, especially when I was still employed and needed to come up with a list of academic publications every year. Nothing. Quick search through my academic folder. Nothing. Curiouser and curiouser. The reference:

Laity, K. A. “The Lost Girl in the Woods: Fairy Tales and Feminism.” Fairy Tale Review, vol. 7, The Aquamarine Issue, 2011, pp. 43-55.

Everything in that citation sounds like something I would have written. I’m real (last I checked). The journal is real. There is an Aquamarine issue, but it was published in 2009. I have written on Lost Girls, fairy tales and feminism without a doubt.

I guess this is just another AI Hallucination. At least it probably won’t lead to severe harm (I certainly hope!) but as with all the wasteful disastrous uses of this grift, it pollutes the world in an intellectual sense as well as the environmental one. Just one example of what’s happening across the globe.

Stay real; don’t use generative AI.