Amazon infested with AI-generated ‘bestsellers’

“Apricot bar code architecture”, an AI-signed Amazon bestseller.

Last Tuesday, the best-selling section of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) program was filled with novels written by… artificial intelligence with rather questionable literary qualities. Unfortunately, the problem seems to be recurring. And while Amazon reportedly settled that as early as Wednesday, that prospect has cause for concern for authors and copyright issues, like art-generating AIs. It also shows that Amazon has never managed to get rid of the click farms that are rotting its service.

Do AIs feel like artists?

Last Tuesday, freelance author Caitlyn Lynch tweeted a screenshot of one of the young adult romance bestsellers. And she adds watch the top 100 [dans cette catégorie]. I see 19 real books. The rest is nonsense content produced by AI “. And a look at the list could hardly prove him wrong: from the cover, to the text of the books, to the Amazon description, nothing makes sense. We thus discover a series of sentences, certainly correct grammatically, but without too much connection between them, and which cannot really be considered as an artistic work.

Amazon reacted the next day, and the bestseller list has since returned to its usual appearance, but the affected books are still available for sale. And without mobilizing human labor – at least on the part of their authors – it is likely that they will remain profitable, even if no one were to buy them. All thanks to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, which allows its subscribers to read as many books on the platform as they want, for a monthly subscription. The authors participating in the program are then remunerated according to the number of pages read.

Publishing content without verifying it would therefore have consequences?

Not content to be the largest distributor, Amazon has found the best way to become the largest book publisher in the world: that is to say, by accepting absolutely all manuscripts submitted to it. Indeed, you can now submit your own book which will be available for sale on Amazon in 6 steps and probably no more than a few minutes. After setting the price, which cannot be less than three euros, congratulations: you are now a published author. No wonder in these conditions that we find so many conspiratorial, neo-Nazi, or quite simply extremely bad works, which have found their place nowhere else.

But if all these books written by AI found themselves so well referenced, it is almost certainly because of the click farms, which had to conscientiously “read” each of them multiple times. And the problem with click farms is that it’s almost as old as Amazon, which apparently never really gets rid of the problem. By being so conveniently located, and costing almost nothing to those who publish them, these books get a piece of the Kindle Unlimited pie, even if curious visitors only read a page or two.

And that is obviously a problem for the independent authors who are members of the program, who risk seeing their income drop. This loss of income is partly due to the loss of visibility induced by the ocean of novelties generated by AI which now competes with them, and which risks reducing their sales. But above all, the Amazon Kindle subscription, which allows you to read as many ebooks as you want on the platform, risks becoming considerably less interesting, for readers and authors alike. Invisible and drowned in meaningless books, they may well end up leaving the program. Before being probably imitated by their readers.

Source : Vice