AI-Generated Books of Nonsense Are All Over Amazon's Bestseller Lists [View all]

[highplainsdem]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7b774/ai-generated-books-of-nonsense-are-all-over-amazons-bestseller-lists

Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited young adult romance bestseller list was filled with dozens of AI-generated books of nonsense on Monday and Tuesday. As of Wednesday morning, Amazon appeared to have taken action against the books, but the episode shows that people are spamming AI-generated nonsense to the platform and are finding a way to monetize it.

“The AI bots have broken Amazon,” wrote Caitlyn Lynch, an indie author, in a Tweet on Monday. “Take a look at the Best Sellers in Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance eBooks top 100 chart. I can see 19 actual legit books. The rest are AI nonsense clearly there to click farm.” Motherboard viewed dozens of clearly AI-generated books Tuesday afternoon; by Wednesday, the vast majority of them had fallen off of the bestseller list but were still available to buy on the platform.

Select titles include: When the three attacks, Apricot bar code architecture, The journey to becoming enlightened is arduous, Department of Vinh Du Stands in Front of His Parents’ Tombstone, The God Tu mutters, Ma La Er snorted scornfully, Jessica's Attention, etc.

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“This will absolutely be the death knell for [Kindle Unlimited] if Amazon cannot kill this off. The KENP payout will halve and writers will pull their books in droves,” Lynch continued in a thread, referring to the payout that publishing writers get based on how many pages of their book were read by Kindle users. If AI-generated nonsense books were those with the farthest reach, then Kindle writers’ income would steeply drop. “I honestly thought Amazon had a handle on the click farms. CLEARLY NOT.”

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I first started focusing on the harm generative AI can do just over 6 months ago, when I saw an article about a Kindle novelist using AI: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217495259 . She and others who thought AI might help writers are now seeing what it will do instead. And of course we're now in the middle of a screenwriters' strike partly about producers and studios wanting to be able to use AI to replace writers.


Image of some of this garbage, from a tweet about this: