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The U.S. Dollar has lost 30% of its purchasing power over the last six years

🦔A photo circulating online shows a printed computer science textbook with ChatGPT's signature phrasing left intact in the body text, including "If you want, I can also explain columns, primary keys, or other DBMS terms" sitting between sections explaining database concepts. The textbook appears to be from South Asia. The image is the latest in a series of documented incidents this year, including the Chicago Sun-Times printing an AI-generated summer reading list with books that did not exist, Hachette Book Group canceling the novel Shy Girl in early 2026 over suspected AI use, a UCLA professor defending her AI-generated textbook after students flagged it as error-ridden, and Elsevier publishing a peer-reviewed paper that contained obvious ChatGPT artifacts in the abstract. My Take A textbook is supposed to be the part of education that has been vetted, edited, and signed off on by people who know the subject, which is the entire reason students pay for them. Finding ChatGPT's conversational scaffolding printed in a database textbook means the publisher cut the editorial chain, ran the manuscript through an LLM, and shipped it without anyone reading the output. Pair that with the Sun-Times running a syndicated insert that nobody at the paper reviewed because they assumed Hearst had editors, and the UCLA professor charging students $25 for an AI textbook she calls a success, and you can see what is actually happening across publishing, journalism, and academia all at once. The editorial function is being eliminated as a cost line, and the savings are being captured by publishers while the quality cost is being passed to readers who do not yet know enough to spot the errors. A student trusting a textbook has no signal to tell them which sentences are accurate and which are hallucinated, and the same is true of a newspaper reader trusting a reading list, or an academic citing a peer-reviewed paper. The traditional checks on what got printed were not perfect, but they existed, and they are being removed faster than the institutions relying on them can adapt. Hedgie🤗

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