Day: January 10, 2024

When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, in an apparent scheme to profit off her work. It looks like another example of the ecommerce giant’s ongoing problem with a glut of low-quality AI-generated ebooks.

Mitchell learned that searching Amazon for her book surfaced not only her own tome but also another ebook with the same title, published last September. It was only 45 pages long and it parroted Mitchell’s ideas in halting, awkward language. The listed author, “Shumaila Majid,” had no bio, headshot, or internet presence, but clicking on that name brought up dozens of similar books summarizing recently published titles.

Mitchell guessed the knock-off ebook was AI-generated, and her hunch appears to be correct. WIRED asked deepfake-detection startup Reality Defender to analyze the ersatz version of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, and its software declared the book 99 percent likely AI-generated. “It made me mad,” says Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. “It’s just horrifying how people are getting suckered into buying these books.”

Amazon took down the imitation of Mitchell’s book after WIRED contacted the company. “While we allow AI-generated content, we don’t allow AI-generated content that violates our Kindle Direct Publishing content guidelines, including content that creates a disappointing customer experience,” Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek says.

But Mitchell is far from the only AI researcher apparently targeted using the same technology they work on. Pioneering computer scientist Fei-Fei Li’s new memoir The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery in the Age of AI has over a dozen different summaries come up when you search for the book on Amazon.

Unlike the takeoff of Mitchell’s book, the summaries of Li’s announce themselves as such. One, forthrightly titled Summary and Analysis of The Worlds I See, has a product description that begins: “DISCLAIMER!! THIS IS NOT A BOOK BY FEI-FEI LI, NOR IS IT AFFILIATED WITH THEM.IT IS AN INDEPENDENT PUBLICATION THAT SUMMARIZES FEI-FEI LI BOOK IN DETAILS.IT IS A SUMMARY.” Yet these books, too, appear to be AI-generated and to add little value for readers. Reality Defender analyzed a sample of the Summary and Analysis book and found it was also likely AI-generated. “A complete and total rewriting of the text. Like, someone queried an LLM to rewrite the text, not summarize it,” Reality Defender head of marketing Scott Steinhardt says. “It’s like a KidzBop version of the real thing.” Reached for comment over email, Li distilled her reaction into a single emoji: ?.

Summary Execution

Sleazy book summaries have been a long-running problem on Amazon. In 2019, The Wall Street Journal found that many used deliberately confusing cover art and text, irking writers including entrepreneur Tim Ferriss. “We, along with some of the publishers, have been trying to get these taken down for some time now,” says Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger. The rise of generative AI has supercharged the spammy summary industry. “It is the first market we expected to see inundated by AI,” Rasenberger says. She says these schemes fit the strengths of large language models, which are passable at producing summaries of work they’re fed, and can do it fast. The fruits of this rapid-fire generation are now common in searches for popular nonfiction titles on Amazon.

AI-generated summaries sold as ebooks have been “dramatically increasing in number, says publishing industry expert Jane Friedman—who was herself the target of a different AI-generated book scheme. That’s despite Amazon in September limiting authors to uploading a maximum of three books to its store each day. “It’s common right now for a nonfiction author to celebrate the launch of their book, then within a few days discover one of these summaries for sale.”

LAS VEGAS — This is the eVTOL Flying Car from XPeng Aeroht, which as the name and eight carbon fiber whiring blades would suggest, is a flying car concept (among others from this CES and past ones). All those blades fold into the body, allowing you to drive down the street without taking anybody’s head off. And to be clear, that would absolutely happen. They’re basically at neck level for almost every adult.

The “dual-mode cockpit” seats two only since the rest of the body is filled with stored blades (or the cavity of those blades when they’re in use). There is both a square wheel/yoke-like thing in front of the driver/pilot, plus a joystick in the center.

Propulsion is electric, but that’s the extent of details about that. This is a concept after all. XPeng Aeroht claims to be the largest flying car company in Asia. It has another, slightly more realistic concept: the Modular Flying Car. It consists of the Ground Module, a futuristic van with a rear end that opens up, GMC Envoy XUV style, to reveal a tiny two-person helicopter dubbed the Air Module. The Ground Module features 6×6 all-wheel-drive, rear-wheel steering (that would be fun to see with four rear wheels) and like all XPeng “creations,” is electric. The Air Module is capable of manual and automatic operation, and not surprisingly given the helicopter blades, is capable of vertical takeoff and landing.

XPeng says it is “dedicated to producing the safest intelligent electric flying car for personal use.” At very least, they’ve created some really cool stuff that wouldn’t look out of a place in a sci-fi movie.

Related Video:

• A surge in Russian demand has made China the world’s top car exporter, per the Wall Street Journal.
• Chinese brands have flooded the Russian market since the war in Ukraine began.
• European, Japanese, and Korean car brands meanwhile have largely left Russia.

China’s auto industry appears to have emerged as a beneficiary of Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine. 

Since Moscow invaded, European, Japanese, and other nations’ vehicle brands have left the Russian market, though China has remained — and surging demand there has helped it notch a record year and surpass Japan as the world’s top auto exporter, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

In 2023, China sold at least five times as many cars in Russia than the 160,000 seen in 2022, data from the China Passenger Car Association showed, per the Journal.

On Tuesday, the group estimated that 5.26 million China-made vehicles were sold overseas over the last 12 months, about a million more than Japan’s automakers.

Russia specifically accounted for about 800,000 of the 2 million additional vehicles China exported in 2023, the Journal reported.

China’s top auto company Chery saw a boom in sales to Russia over that stretch, sending 900,000 cars overseas in total. Automakers Geely and Great Wall Motor similarly saw a sharp uptick in car sales to Russia. 

At the same time, domestic demand in China also bounced back in 2023 with its electric-vehicle sector fueling its strongest growth in several years, the car association said. Chinese Tesla rival BYD, for instance, beat out Elon Musk’s company as the world’s top EV seller in the most recent quarter. 

Still, since the war in Ukraine began, Russia’s car industry isn’t what it once was compared to pre-war times.

In the aftermath of the invasion, purchases of foreign-made cars in Russia neared a standstill, according to a July report from Yale researchers. A combination of soaring prices, weak consumer sentiment, and dwindling supply has sent domestic car sales crashing to roughly a quarter of pre-war times.

"Russians are just buying less cars, period," researcher Steven Tian said in an interview with Business Insider at the time. "That speaks to the weakness of the consumer in Russia. This is as close to a proxy to deteriorating consumer sentiment as there is, and the story it tells is profoundly distressing. Russians just aren’t spending money."