Fraudulent books written by artificial intelligence flood Amazon

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The number of fraudulent ebooks generated by artificial intelligence has skyrocketed on Amazon. They are often short retellings or summaries of popular non-fiction books written by leading experts in their respective fields.

Here's What We Know

AI researcher Melanie Mitchell discovered that a search for her book "Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans" on Amazon turns up a fake 45-page imitation alongside the original edition. Experts from Reality Defender found that it was 99 per cent likely to have been generated by an AI.

A similar situation happened with the recently released memoirs of another scientist, Fei-Fei Li. A search for her book "The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery in the Age of AI" returns more than a dozen different summaries.

Publishing expert Jane Friedman has noted a significant increase in the number of abstracts sold as ebooks. It is now often the case that just days after a nonfiction book is released, similar AI-generated works appear on Amazon.

The legal status of such books is ambiguous. Many experts agree that a simple summary retelling of someone else's work without obvious plagiarism is difficult to prohibit.

Nevertheless, the authors of the original books have raised concerns that their labour is being used for profit by fraudsters.

Source: Wired