Best books of 2023 – with a twist – from Elon Musk biography and Prince Harry’s Spare to Hong Kong poetry

Post Magazine rounds up 2023’s best books, which explore the line between fact and fiction, inspired by Cambridge Dictionary word of the year, hallucinate

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The cover of Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson. The biography makes our list of best books of 2023 under the theme of the Cambridge Dictionary word of the year, “hallucination”.

James Kidd

Published: 1:15pm, 31 Dec 2023Updated: 2:36pm, 4 Jan 2024

The word of the year 2023, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is “hallucinate”.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, the verb has evolved beyond the traditional definition in which humans sense things that are not there (from the Latin alucinatus, “to stray in the mind”).

Today’s hallucinations include a machine’s capacity to generate (or dare we say invent) false information. As an example, Cambridge Dictionary mentions two American lawyers at Levidow, Levidow & Oberman who were fined US$5,000 for quoting non-existent legal cases in a brief.

The source of their misinformation? A “hallucinating” ChatGPT chatbot generator.

Our current preoccupation with all things AI has reawakened discussions asking whether computers could write a novel to compare with Ulysses or Harry Potter or even Jeffrey Archer.

AI-generated books have been flooding the online market for years, to such an extent that, in September, Amazon imposed a three-books-a-day limit on self-publishing authors. Three books a day? Even the famously prolific crime writer James Patterson might struggle to keep up with that.