Librarians grapple with AI-generated material in collections
By Reema Saleh | September 2, 2025
Illustration: Tom Deja
Librarian Sondra Eklund spends her time stocking books for the public library system she works for in Virginia. One of her patrons recently asked the library to acquire a children’s book about pets other than cats or dogs, so she went looking.
When she came across a book titled* Rabbits: Children’s Animal Fact Book* from the publisher Bold Kids, it seemed promising. Eklund hadn’t heard of Bold Kids before, but it offers nearly 500 books on Goodreads and Amazon…
Librarians grapple with AI-generated material in collections
By Reema Saleh | September 2, 2025
Illustration: Tom Deja
Librarian Sondra Eklund spends her time stocking books for the public library system she works for in Virginia. One of her patrons recently asked the library to acquire a children’s book about pets other than cats or dogs, so she went looking.
When she came across a book titled* Rabbits: Children’s Animal Fact Book* from the publisher Bold Kids, it seemed promising. Eklund hadn’t heard of Bold Kids before, but it offers nearly 500 books on Goodreads and Amazon, and its paperbacks aren’t expensive. Though the catalog showed only the book’s cover—not its interior—she put in the order, thinking, “How bad could it be?”
But when the book arrived, Eklund learned the answer: “Unbelievably bad.”
Its pages contained strangely worded sentences, some of them including made-up facts about rabbits (such as the claim that they make their own clothes). Every page of text featured the same clip art of a bunny eating a carrot. Stock photos of rabbits littered the pages, their eyes and noses disappearing into the book’s bleed.
Rabbits: Children’s Animal Fact Book, published by Bold Kids, is a title suspected to hav