Librarians, and the books they cherish, are already fight a losing battle for our attention spans with all kinds of tech-enabled brainrot. Now, in a further assault to their sanity, AI models are generating so much slop that students and researchers keep coming into libraries and asking for journals, books, and records that don’t exist, Scientific American reports. “For our staff, it is much harder to prove that a unique record doesn’t exist,” Falls added. Other librarians and researchers have spoken out about AI’s effects on their profession. The field of AI research itself, ironically, is drowning in a flood of AI-written papers as some academics publish upwards of one hundred shoddily-written studies a year.