Veteran Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher has published a recent memoir. But if you’re buying it on Amazon, do not be fooled into buying AI-generated garbage.
According to 404 Mediacopies of Kara Swisher’s recent book Burn Book: A Love Story in Technology, have spread to Amazon. A fast seek for “Kara Swisher Burn Book” on the positioning shows the actual book as the primary result. Below are pages of (we assume unauthorized) biographies of the tech journalist’s life and times, capitalizing on the book’s anticipated release.
This creator’s name sounds really fake.
Source: Amazon
This is not the primary time Amazon has been flooded with AI-generated books. Last August, creator Jane Friedman was shocked to find that she had written half a dozen books. Except Friedman didn’t write them, and he or she rightly believes they were generated by artificial intelligence. Why? Because her extensive writings can be found online and simply reproduced using generative artificial intelligence. Although the Swisher books are written by authors with honest-sounding, really fake-sounding names like Cheryl J. Stackhouse and Kara Press, their summaries read very very like AI-generated text scraped from Swisher’s Wikipedia page.
Some people like books Kara Swisher: Silicon Valley Bulldog (biography) by Jane Coelho, the duvet doesn’t even feature Swisher, but a woman who looks a little like her.
Um, that is not Kara Swisher.
Source: Amazon
Kara Swisher: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist by the aforementioned Stackhouse has what looks like an AI-generated image of Swisher on the duvet. Swisher’s image has a smooth, waxy appearance paying homage to AI’s signature style.
Wow, this book is 77 pages long!
Source: Amazon
Incidentally, Stackhouse has published 23 biographies in 2024, including those about Brittany Griner and Gypsy Rose. Man, she is prolific.
Even if these books aren’t AI-generated, you probably won’t get the juicy and fascinating story of Swisher’s encounters with the tech elite that you’ll find in her actual book. Kara Swisher: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist has a full 77 pages. Whether or not this content was generated by artificial intelligence, it calls into query Amazon’s quality control, or lack thereof. And now that generative AI tools are widely available, making it easy to “write” books in minutes, stemming the flow of AI-generated garbage on Amazon or anywhere on the Internet is almost not possible.
At the time of publication, it appeared that a few of these books had already been removed. In a statement to Mashable, Amazon confirmed that it had removed “many titles that violate our guidelines.” “We do not allow AI-generated content that degrade the client experience. We have proactive and reactive measures to review content on our store,” said Amazon spokeswoman Ashley Vanicek.
All it took was a well-publicized memoir by a respected journalist for Amazon to adopt it. Thank you again, Kara Swisher.
Credit : mashable.com
