The Machines Are Making Up Books Now, and Librarians Are Losing Their Minds

Look, I’ve always said AI would come for us all eventually. But I figured it’d start with the stockbrokers or the lawyers—you know, jobs where making stuff up is already part of the game.

Instead, the robots went after librarians.

According to Scientific American, students and researchers keep walking into libraries asking for books, journals, and archival records that don’t exist. Never existed. Were conjured wholesale from the statistical fever dreams of ChatGPT and its silicon siblings.

The International Committee of the Red Cross—yes, that Red Cross—had to issue an actual warning about this. Their AI chatbot disclaimer basically reads: “These things don’t research. They don’t verify. They just make stuff up that sounds right.”

Sarah Falls over at the Library of Virginia says fifteen percent of her email inquiries are now AI-generated garbage hunts. That’s one in six researchers showing up with a shopping list of phantoms.

And here’s the beautiful part: proving something doesn’t exist is infinitely harder than finding something that does. These librarians are essentially being asked to prove a negative, over and over, because some kid trusted Google’s AI summary instead of doing actual work.

One scholarly librarian on Bluesky said they spent their morning chasing citations that led nowhere before the student finally admitted the sources came from an AI. Three strikes before confession. That’s not research methodology—that’s a bad first date.

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s pushing “deep research” tools they claim work “at the level of a research analyst.” But they also admit these tools struggle to separate “authoritative information from rumors.” In other words: trust us, but also don’t.

The real tragedy? Actual research is getting buried under an avalanche of AI-generated academic papers. Some professors are cranking out a hundred studies a year now. Nobody’s that productive. Nobody’s even that caffeinated.

We built machines to help us find truth, and they’re filling libraries with ghosts.

Source: Librarians Dumbfounded as People Keep Asking for Materials That Don’t Exist