Breakdown
- The Amazon Kindle platform is being abused by AI book scams
- Amazon Advertising and Kindle Unlimited have been flooded with AI generated garbage
- Real authors are unable to gain traction against the horde of AI material
The Amazon Kindle ecosystem of e-books has been ravaged by an ongoing AI Book scam that’s designed to redirect attention and money away from real human authors.
With AI chatbot services like ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot able to generate an entire novel after receiving just a short prompt, the latest get rich quick scheme involves generating thousands of poorly-written books to flood the Amazon Kindle Store.
Complete with AI art covers generated by Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, often with garbled text and other major red flags, these AI books have plagued the Amazon storefront for the past year, but now it’s getting even more egregious.
Following AI comic books and even awful AI films, the destruction the technology has raised on the Kindle ecosystem is unparalleled.
As reported by Futurism, adverts for AI books are now flooding the front pages of Amazon Kindle devices. Those who purchase Kindles at cheaper prices will receive adverts on the Lock Screen, and these are now peddling AI generated books with atrocious AI art covers.
The AI Book Scam is actually designed to take advantage of two of the best tools for up-and-coming authors on the Kindle ecosystem: Amazon Advertising and Kindle Unlimited.
Amazon Advertising lets authors set a budget for their books to be shown on Kindle Lock Screens, only paying once a reader clicks on the ad. Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service by Amazon that pays writers per page read by a reader.
The latest Kindle scam has bad apples generate thousands of AI books, make them available in Kindle Unlimited, sign up for paid advertising and hope subscribers read enough pages to make a profit. The goal is to make churn content that Kindle Unlimited subscribers will read enough of to pay out more than the ad was worth, and that’s it.
“There are people who spend $20k monthly on advertising without blinking [because] they'll make $30k back if they flood the charts and get enough people to idly flip through,” New York Times bestselling author Bree Bridges told Futurism.
Unsurprisingly, this method of churn content has actually existed before AI took over the internet. Previously, poorly paid ghost writers from lower income countries would write out entire novels. Now, that’s all done with AI, and the results are sometimes even worse.
When it launched, Kindle Unlimited was an essential tool for self-published authors, but it was very quickly manipulated by bad apples into a money making scheme. While Amazon has attempted to quell this new AI Book Scam by banning accounts, the sheer number of submissions may be too much for the company to deal with.