Last week, a story broke in The New York Times and other news outlets reporting that the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer had published an AI-assisted, syndicated story that contained a substantial amount of fictitious information.

The story, which offered a summer reading list for 2025, included made-up book titles by known authors, the Times reported. This represents a black eye for both the outlets carrying the story and AI in general, which has been fighting the war on “hallucinations” ever since these tools hit the mainstream.

Beyond the facts of the story, however, sits a bigger conversation about the rapidly blurring distinction between marketing content and journalism. This could not be more critical as we move forward at warp speed into a world powered by AI, which promises to play a massive role in making content easier and faster to produce.

Here’s the challenge. As content becomes interchangeable with journalism, how can we know the news we consume is true, since that certainty stems from the professional rigor with which reporters, editors and producers vet stories, check facts, conduct interviews and seek to provide meaningful context?

Granted, the Sun-Times story was the result of reportedly sloppy journalism that let the content engine work unchecked. But this same type of content is already filling our X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok feeds in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish from the work of bona fide journalists.

Savvy news consumers, of course, can tell the difference between a New York Times story and a post from a little-known entity. But what about posts once or twice removed that cite this “news?” How can we know its original source?

And what of the search engine or chatbot results that choose content over journalism in their results? Or aggregated news feeds that automatically combine the two?

This all points to a problem that will only grow worse before it improves, if it ever does, as we enter an era where our windows to the broader world are increasingly filled with words and images that may have little or no basis in fact.