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The financial boosters and backers of the artificial intelligence industry like to argue that, for better or worse, the ubiquity of AI-generated content is inevitable in the near future.
For all of us living in the world of their making, we know 1) it’s basically been for the worse and 2) it doesn’t have to be inevitable.
There are probably some uses for AI that are helpful in some capacity, but for many of us, our experience with the big plagiarism computers is seeing them used as… big plagiarism computers.
Take the case of Phil Steele’s annual college football preview. The preseason magazine has been published since 1995 and is a foundational text for anyone covering the sport year after year. Before the advent of our glorious AI-driven future, when you bought a book titled Phil Steele’s College Football Preview, you could feel confident that you were purchasing a preview of the coming college football season written by Phil Steele. That is simply no longer the case.
As Steele laid out on his site, there are several books on Amazon using his name to sell what appear to be AI slop knockoffs of his work.
“We got a call in the office yesterday with an angry Phil Steele customer,” he wrote. “He said he just bought a smaller Phil Steele magazine from Amazon and was very unhappy with the product. It was nowhere near the Phil Steele Quality that we put out, and he was angry with the purchase. We told him there are no smaller versions of the magazine. We produced ONE College Football Magazine in print and it 376 pages with two full pages on every FBS team. He said it is right there on the Front Cover, Phil Steele!”
A brief investigation by Steele found that four different magazines were listed on Amazon using his name to try to swindle customers.
“These magazines are FAKE! They are SCAMS!” Steele wrote. “They are trying to take advantage of my good name, which I have spent 32 years putting 7 months of labor each year into the magazine.”
The influx of AI-generated content self-published on Amazon has been a fairly widely covered phenomenon. Using artificial intelligence to build out the copy inside something you are selling as your own work is bad enough, but the inclusion of Steele’s name on all of his newfound competitors is especially problematic.
Even if the content inside the knockoffs had some degree of value, or even if they were produced by an actual human (as unlikely as that sounds) the fact that they are passing themselves off as something they are not is damning to a point where they should clearly not exist.
Steele’s publication is not the only one at risk of having its water muddied by others trying to churn out lower-quality content and capitalize on other figures’ brands. Several prominent writers and podcasts put out similar previews, be they about gambling, fantasy football, or the NFL draft.
Hopefully Amazon takes action to cut out these lookalikes, or else this problem is only going to grow from here. In the meantime, if you’re going to buy one of these types of magazines, it’s probably best to get it straight from the source.
The post The Amazon AI slop industry is coming for your favorite college football preview appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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