Can consumers be a force behind responsible AI?

AI generated books are being used to scam book buyers and redirect earnings from the authors who have laboured over their craft to AI powered scammers exploiting loopholes on eCommerce platforms like Amazon.

While writing may be a labour of love, it is a skill that takes years to harness, requires authors to work hard, dig deep to give of themselves and, often, they must be vulnerable and face their fiercest demons and traumas to present us with books that we can fall in love with and learn from. They deserve to be fairly compensated and many have a hard enough time being able to live from their writing as it is.

From biographies about authors and famous people that have no bearing on reality to brazen scammers that simply publish AI generated books using successful author names.

Imagine, if you will, that while we’re waiting - with bated breath - for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Margaret Atwood to release their next bestsellers, someone decides to help them along and take the proceeds (leaving us with an inferior paid for product, ruining the author’s reputation and creating difficulties for the distribution of the actual future novels).

Amazon has since introduced a requirement for authors publishing on kindle to declare AI generated content. While more extensive verification methods may be useful here, it’s unclear whether they are on the cards.

In another example of brazenly hijacking other people’s labour, a search engine optimisation (SEO) ‘expert’ proudly bragged - here on LinkedIn - about hijacking traffic from a competitor site by using AI to analyse the competitor site’s structure and content and to regenerate similar pages in the hundreds, if not thousands. Essentially, they „quickly“ recreated the original site and commandeered its traffic.

Said post wasn’t about illustrating the concerning misuse of AI, it was a post advertising SEO services - a “look what we could do for you” business post. I’ve previously posted about how baffling it is that people seem to think that the use of AI absolves them from existing regulations and laws.

These are extreme examples and - as I’ve previously posted - it’s not AI that we need to worry about - but rather the sinister amongst those building it, controlling it, selling it and using it. As consumers, we’ll increasingly be faced with products and services created / generated with and by artificial intelligence.

Soon a book will be presented to you, let’s say its a novel. It will move you…perhaps even mirror some of your own life story back to you - cause you to burst out in laughter or shed cathartic tears. It will give you that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from consuming good art in the form of well created prose. The experience might even be transcendent: You - changed forever by an incredible book. You will feel ever-so-grateful to the author for sharing their story with you.

Will it matter if that author isn’t human?

This post was originally posted in December 2023.