Amazon has been a major staging ground for the spread of AI-generated spam. In fact, as we noticed earlier this year, the marketplace has already begun to be flooded with poor quality AI-generated listings; At the same time, of course, Amazon itself is working on technology to produce more of the same.
Now the results of this proliferation appear to be spreading into the world of Amazon’s millions of readers. Many of the world’s Kindles, by far the most popular e-readers, clearly show ads for AI-generated books. And they appear not in a small box, but in one of the publishing industry’s most visible advertising spaces: the Kindle’s lock screen.
If you don’t know that these reading devices can also be advertising tools, here’s a brief background. In the US, Amazon is selling Kindles, including the popular Kindle Paperwhite, for $20 off the $189.99 retail price if you buy an “ad-supported” version. Take advantage of the discount; Your Kindle will display ads as a large screensaver when the device is locked, and as smaller ads on its home screen.
Users tired of ads can pay to remove them at any time for a one-time fee of $20. It’s admittedly a bit of a slimy app, but it saves people money, and at least some users enjoy getting recommendations based on their reading habits.
But starting a few months ago, this prominent advertising space began to be occupied by junk books with clearly AI-generated cover images. Kindle owners, who were astonished by what they saw, began to complain on social media.
“I’ve had a Kindle for about 10 years,” one Reddit user wrote in a post that received more than 700 upvotes. “I never paid any attention to the ads on them…until they were flooded with AI-generated books.”
“I don’t know why or how this happened, but it drives me crazy that even though I’ve never bought a children’s book before, the only advertising I get now is these artificial intelligence children’s stories.” [Kindle Unlimited]Another aggrieved owner wrote: “Anyone else getting tired of these? I’m about to give up and pay $20 to have the ads turned off.”
So who can blame them? You’d probably be annoyed too if your smartphone’s lock screen started bombarding you with spammy AI images.
Here’s a small sampling of book titles we’ve encountered ourselves and on social media: “Secret Adventures of the Magic Forest,” “The Boy and the Monsters,” “Alchemy Riddles,” and “Unexpected Consequences.” To a surprising extent, there are some variations on the subtitle “Bedtime Story for Kids and Adults” — which isn’t surprising, since we’ve already seen lazy creators willing to shovel AI crap at kids who probably won’t do it. Understand what they see.
Worse, some of the AI books advertised by Kindles appear to be overt copies of existing works, such as “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: The Haunted House,” a blatant imitation of the classic collection of children’s short horror stories. By Alvin Schwartz.
The books’ Amazon pages give little detail beyond the author’s name, with no bio and perhaps a general blurb. Notably, these author names never appear on the AI-generated book covers or anywhere in Kindle advertisements.
The cover images are likewise derivative, always feeding into the mobile-game-art-monkey-anime-art style. Meanwhile, some of the ones still live appear to have either had their cover images changed or been replaced with another AI parody under the same title. For example, compare the list “Whispers of the Secret Portal” with the image below.
Another confusing detail: None of these AI-generated books appear to be popular, so we can assume that the sellers are somehow gaming Amazon’s algorithms, or perhaps Amazon itself is intervening by manually favoring these fake books in some kind of experiment.
Whatever is driving him comes like a flood. After ads for AI-generated books began appearing on this reporter’s Kindle lock screen, ads for popular books and taste-based recommendations quickly took over, disappearing for days at certain points.
Amazon did not provide a response at the time of publication.
The proliferation of books produced by artificial intelligence on Amazon is not a new phenomenon. But it’s surprising to see Amazon abandon the lock screen on its Kindles, its groundbreaking hardware platform, and a valuable ecosystem for both readers and writers.
So it’s a grim preview of AI-generated crap being amplified by advertising algorithms. Open takeaway? Amazon can’t be bothered to curate one of the most valuable marketplaces or even seemingly find a human to look at it because it’s been taken over by lazy spam.
Or maybe by holding your lock screens hostage, Amazon hopes to force readers to pay the extra $20 to stop receiving ads altogether. It’s a bit of a stretch, of course, but who knows: maybe one day we’ll pay for a subscription tier to see “real” product promotions instead of algorithmically delivered AI-generated products. One Kindle owner, whose lock screen was filled with AI images, pleaded: “How can I get more targeted ads?”
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