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Maybe yet another reason to support your local bookstore, instead of Amazon?
Scammy AI-Generated Book Rewrites Are Flooding Amazon
Authors keep finding what appear to be AI-generated imitations and summaries of their books on Amazon. There's little they can do to rein in the rip-offs.
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.
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.” https://www.wired.com/story/scammy-a...ooding-amazon/
Do what so many other brands are doing and get off Amazon.
The platform is not in a good place right now. Too many fake products which are really bad, 50% of the search results are advertisements and not real results all mixed in to maximize annoyance requiring the use of extensions to remove the out of control advertising. It's become Alibaba with more advertising that you pay a yearly fee for. Just use Alibaba. Better website, less advertising, same products, no fee. The shipping is slower though. If you really need the stuff next day that's really the reason to put up with the shenanigans.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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My wife bought some skin moisturizer from Amazon that she has used for years, but got a rash. She compared the bottle to the old one in the trash and discovered that it was a copycat/fake. I think the proliferation of this kind of fraud has gotten too much for Amazon to keep up with, the 15,000 employees working on it are still not enough.
My wife bought some skin moisturizer from Amazon that she has used for years, but got a rash. She compared the bottle to the old one in the trash and discovered that it was a copycat/fake. I think the proliferation of this kind of fraud has gotten too much for Amazon to keep up with, the 15,000 employees working on it are still not enough.
Yup. The worst part is the biggest peddler of frauds is Amazon itself.
1) Get a browser extension that removes all the sponsored results Amazon shoves into your searches. Since the biggest peddler of fake products is Amazon, that cuts down on the fakes significantly. It's hypercompetitive so generally it's only the fakes that have enough money to bribe Bezos to shove their fake products into your search results where any other third-party seller doesn't have those margins. Seller reviews mean nothing. Amazon has about 70 billion reviews to review before posting and they only review the negative ones for review bombing purposes. Effectively that means it takes months to years to never for any negative reviews to actually show up by which time the fake reseller that's been paying Bezos to advertise the fakes has been banned and created a new account to repeat the process.
2) First-party stores and trusted resellers only. If you don't recognize the reseller, you have to assume it's fake nowadays unless you have reason to believe otherwise. With very few exceptions I don't buy anything from Amazon that is not from a first-party seller. Neutrogena selling Neutrogena, probably safe. BeautyDolphinGirl3338? Probably fake, particularly if it was a sponsored result.
Digital Content - Get off Amazon. You own nothing. You have a revocable license to stream content on demand that they can and do revoke whenever there is a licensing issue or just because they want to. Look into Epubor which is the only way I know of getting the stuff you don't own off Kindle so that you actually own it. It's much more of a PITA than it used to be but still possible. It's less of an issue with Kindle stuff but given Amazon's history with movie/music/TV content, I don't trust them.
Do what so many other brands are doing and get off Amazon.
The platform is not in a good place right now. Too many fake products which are really bad, 50% of the search results are advertisements and not real results all mixed in to maximize annoyance requiring the use of extensions to remove the out of control advertising. It's become Alibaba with more advertising that you pay a yearly fee for. Just use Alibaba. Better website, less advertising, same products, no fee. The shipping is slower though. If you really need the stuff next day that's really the reason to put up with the shenanigans.
Well, I've always been anti-Amazon, but clearly have had no luck persuading others to give it up. By the way, adding to your list: They also often operate despicably to both their workers, their vendors, and, by implication, their customers.
I agree with you, there are a lot of fake products on Amazon right now and need to get out of there. I now prefer to buy books and textbooks for college [url]https://booksrun.com/[/url] on specialized resources. It's easy enough to type in the ISBN to find the book you want. Bookstores are more careful in selecting booksellers and eliminating the risk of counterfeit books, which is very important for my studies
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