Election AI slop isn’t just flying around on Facebook pages — it’s coming for your Kindles.
Driving the news: AI-generated books about Prime Minister Mark Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre have flooded Amazon ahead of the April 28 election, per Bloomberg News. Roughly 30 AI books about Carney and six about Poilievre have been published so far this year.
- Just last month, 16 books about Carney were published and listed on Amazon, five of which were put out in a single day. One “biography” had a picture of a random man who is definitely not Mark Carney.
- Serial AI book creators are largely to blame. One “author” who “penned” a Poilievre biography has “written” — we use all those terms loosely — 550 books on everything from the British Empire to air fryer recipes.
Why it matters: The Carney-Poilievre books are just the tip of the iceberg. Authors have been complaining that Amazon is riddled with AI knock-offs and summaries of their original books that often sell many copies before being taken down.
- Amazon has had to change its self-publishing rules to address the surge in AI-generated books, including a three-books-a-day publishing limit for authors.
- Experts say that because IP laws around copycats can be vague, there’s little that authors who have lost sales to these AI-generated books can do.
Big picture: Amazon isn’t alone. Social media platforms, YouTube, and music streamers like Spotify are all being inundated with AI-generated slop.—LA