Kindle e-readers have long served as a medium for showing ads. Users either chose to live with it or pay the extra $20 to get rid of those though many said that just politely asking the Amazon support staff to remove the ads worked for many. So far so good but as Futurism reported, here is a new kind of menace that is slowly becoming mainstream – AI-generated cover art of books.
Such books again have been the handiwork of AI tools though the worst part of it is that many of the books so advertised happen to be direct rip-offs of existing titles. Many even said they enjoyed the ads as they often aligned with their reading pattern. But not anymore as such readers said they are now being served AI kids stories even though they have never shown any interest in such stories before.
“I don’t know why or how this is happening, but it’s driving me insane that the only ads I get now seem to be these AI kids stories when I’ve never gotten a children’s book from [Kindle Unlimited],” wrote a Kindle owner on Reddit. “Is anyone else tired of these? I’m about to cave and pay the $20 to have ads turned off.”
What is intriguing is that the books in question do not seem to be too popular, which makes one wonder if Amazon has taken it upon itself to promote such stuff, or if it could be some sort of experiment that it has gotten into. Maybe the authors of such AI-derived books have somehow learned to trick Amazon’s algorithms to promote their books via Kindle lock-screen ads.
“We aim to provide the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience, and we are constantly evaluating developments that impact that experience, which includes the rapid evolution and expansion of generative AI tools,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
“All books in the store must adhere to our content guidelines, regardless of how the content was created,” the spokesperson added. “We both proactively prevent books from being listed as well as remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines. Amazon’s ad policies aim to maintain a high customer experience bar for the ads that we show and all ads must meet Amazon Advertising Guidelines and Acceptance policies.”
Amazon had earlier made it mandatory for authors to declare if their books are written by AI tools in response to a flurry of e-books that started to make it to its bookstore. In any case, a tell-tale sign of a book being Ai-written is that the Amazon pages of such books usually aren’t as detailed as it would be for a real book written by a real author. There likely would be not much beyond the author’s name along with a generic author’s biography which again could have been AI-generated.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I'll likely make a film sometime in the future.