by Amazon has been a massive staging ground for the proliferation of AI-generated spam. In fact, as we noted earlier this year, its market has already begun to be filled with AI-generated shoddy lists – at the same time, of course, that Amazon itself is working on the technology to make more of the same generate.
Now the consequences of this proliferation seem to be spilling over into the lives of millions of Amazon readers. Many of its Kindles, the world’s most popular e-readers, are showing ads for AI-generated books. And they’re showing up not as a small box but in one of the most visible advertising spaces in the publishing industry: the Kindle green screen.
If you didn’t know that these reading devices can also be advertising vehicles, here’s a quick background. In the US, Amazon sells Kindles, including the popular Kindle Paperwhite, at a $20 discount from its retail price of $189.99 if you buy an “ad-supported” edition. Take the discount, and your Kindle will essentially show ads as a large screensaver when the device is locked, along with smaller ads on its home screen.
Users who are tired of ads can pay to remove them at any time for a one-time fee of $20. A somewhat narrow practice, no doubt, but it saves people money, and at least some users enjoyed getting recommendations based on their reading habits.
Starting several months ago, however, this prominent piece of real estate began to be taken up by junk books with obvious AI-generated cover art. Kindle owners began to complain on social media, shocked by what they were seeing.
“I’ve owned a Kindle for 10 years or so now,” wrote one Reddit user in a post with more than 700 votes. “I didn’t pay any attention to the ads on them … until they were flooded with AI-generated books.”
“I don’t know why or how this is happening, but it’s bothering me that these ads I get now seem to be these AI children’s stories when I never found a children’s book . [Kindle Unlimited],” wrote another aggrieved owner. “Is anyone else tired of these? I’m about to cave and pay the $20 to turn off ads.”
And who can blame them? If your smartphone’s lock screen had started bombarding you with AI spam images, you’d probably get angry too.
Here’s a small sample of the book titles we’ve seen on ourselves and on social media: “The Secret Adventures of the Magical Forest,” “The Boy and the Monsters,” “Riddles of the Alchemy,” and “The Unexpected Consequences.” Subtitled “A Bedtime Story for Children and Adults” a great number of them have a variation – which is not surprising, as we have already seen that creators of lazy AI content are eager to swallow children, and probably not will be. have a good understanding of what they see.
Worse, some of the AI books announced by the Kindles appear to be significant rip-offs of existing works, such as this book called “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: The Haunted House” – a clear imitation of the classic children’s horror short story collection. by Alvin Schwartz.
On the books’ Amazon pages, very little information is provided beyond an author’s name with no biography and perhaps a generic blurb. Notably, these author names do not appear on the AI-generated book covers themselves, or anywhere else in the Kindle ads.
The cover images are just as derivative, always describing the mobile-game-aping-anime-art style. Meanwhile, some of the ones that are still up seem to have swapped their cover images or been replaced by another AI imitation under the same title. Compare this listing of “Whispers of the Secret Portal,” for example, with the image below.
Another terrible rock: these AI-generated books seem to be unpopular, so it can only be assumed that their sellers are gaming Amazon’s algorithms in some way or that Amazon itself is intervening through the books favor this fake by hand in some kind of experiment.
Whatever is driving it, it feels like a flood. Once the AI-generated book ads started appearing on this reporter’s Kindle lock screen, they quickly took over, with popular book ads and flavor-based recommendations disappearing for, at some points, days at the time.
Amazon did not provide a response by the time of publication.
AI-generated books proliferating on Amazon is not a new phenomenon. But it’s surprising to see Amazon giving the green screen to its Kindles, its separate hardware platform and valuable ecosystem for readers and authors alike.
As such, it’s a grim preview of AI-generated evil augmented by advertising algorithms. Do you bring clear? Amazon can’t afford to take care of—or even get someone to look at—one of its most valuable marketplaces because lazy spam has taken over.
Or perhaps by holding your lock screens hostage, Amazon hopes to push readers to shell out the extra $20 to stop receiving ads altogether. It’s a stretch, sure, but who knows: maybe one day we’ll be paying for a series of subscriptions to see “real” product launches instead of AI-generated ones delivered to an algorithm. As one Kindle owner whose lock screen was inundated with AI images put it: “How can I get more targeted ads?”
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