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How did AI bots break Amazon?

Answer: By flooding the Kindle store with nonsense books.

The Amazon Kindle logo with a blue background.
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Perhaps this is how the robot revolution starts — rather than physically rising up against us, the bots will just overwhelm the Internet with their own content until there’s nothing human left on it. That’s what they did in June in Amazon’s Kindle online bookstore.

Twitter users reported a barrage of nonsense AI books topping the platform’s Kindle Unlimited young adult romance bestseller list at the end of June. “The AI bots have broken Amazon,” tweeted indie author Caitlyn Lynch. She went on to explain that of the top 100 books on the list, only 19 appeared to be legitimate books written by humans. The remaining 81 appear to have been written by AI, with nonsensical titles like Apricot bar code architecture, Ma La Er snorted scornfully, and Department of Vinh Du Stands in Front of His Parents’ Tombstone.

Lynch went on to note how detrimental this trend could be to human authors if it continues (Amazon reportedly took most of the AI books on the list down after a few days). In the Kindle store, writers get a payout based on how many pages of their book were read by Kindle users. If this isn’t high enough, because the AI-generated books are getting all the attention, then why would authors continue to publish in the Kindle store? And who’s to say Amazon is the only digital bookstore that could have this problem?
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