Almost like Amazon should have some responsibility in properly vetting their sellers. This isn't the only case of bad quality bootlegs on Amazon. They have no decent incentive to fix it if they are making more money from it. It doesn't help when the blame is filtered through the smokescreen of ephemeral merchants.
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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I agree. I'm not sure whether Amazon should get fines the second a bad seller makes a bad action, but they should definitely have to prove (according to external criteria) that they are making good faith efforts to remove bad actors.
After reading that, I checked up on my mother, who is an author. No AI-generated books, but for some reason, Amazon is selling a copy of a 10-page xeroxed journal put out by the students of her graduate school in 1968. She has no idea what she wrote in it and it's not really worth buying (if I really want to see it, the university has a copy in their library). But what a bizarre find on Amazon.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Upon searching Amazon and Goodreads, author Jane Friedman recently discovered a half-dozen listings of fraudulent books using her name, likely filled with either junk or AI-generated content.
On Goodreads, the process requires authors to reach out to volunteer "librarians" and join specific groups and post in comment threads to request the removal of illegitimate books.
Friedman reports that Goodreads removed the offending titles from her official author profile hours after her blog post went live.
Although the fraudulent titles were eventually removed from Amazon after the story blew up, Friedman's experience sheds light on the complex process authors must navigate to protect their name and work online.
In a world where generative AI could potentially flood our communication channels with noise—low-quality, automated creative output in unlimited quantity—open selling platforms such as Amazon haven't caught up with how to deal with the problem yet.
On X, historian Dean Grodzins wrote, "I once bought what Amazon indicated was a paperback edition of George Saunders’s Swim in the Pond in the Rain.
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