These are real, but the fakes may not look very different!
Artificial Intelligence has been a big buzzword this year, in part because of hopes it will be helpful to humanity, and in part because it’s been caught making up court cases, journal articles and more. And now, according to the New York Times, it’s taken to writing useless and fake travel guides.
A Times article earlier this week reported that dozens to hundreds of new titles have appeared on Amazon along with the well-known traditional series from publishers such as Frommers, Fodors, Lonely Planet and Rick Steves. In fact, some of them have names that even look a bit like the legit, one ‘Mike Steves’ being a case in point.
The books the Times looked at contained little actual information or advice, and some even lack maps and illustrations, although they were all favored with dozens of five-star reviews, many of which appeared to have little to do with the books or the travel destination.
The Times ran over five dozen of the books it bought through software designed to spot material produced by AI and estimate, on a scale of 0 to 100 the chances it was produced by AI. Over 80% were rated 100, and fewer than a dozen were rated below 75. By contrast, books from Rick Steves, Frommer’s and similar were all rated below 10.
Amazon, where most of the books are sold and many are published through its various services, apparently doesn’t see a problem with either the content of the books or the plethora of fake reviews. A spokesperson told the Times that “All publishers in the store must adhere to our content guidelines. We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed and remove books that do not adhere to these guidelines.” It appears either that the guidelines are very lax, or that Amazon needs some Actual Intelligence to police its pages.
