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My guess would be this is an overzealous AI-generated content detector. Amazon has been flooded with low quality AI generated books in the past ~year, and has b

by cdrini 3y ago

My guess would be this is an overzealous AI-generated content detector. Amazon has been flooded with low quality AI generated books in the past ~year, and has been removing a lot of it. My guess would be they're still tweaking their algorithms as folks generating books change their tactics. Hopefully a human will respond soon!

jruohonen 3y ago
That would be my guess too. A few months back they announced a ML model to clean up the reviews, but I'd argue that it is a lost battle; there is so much human-made and now AI-made garbage already. A solution might be a full deletion and then a real identity verification for reviewers.
- wil421 3y ago
  Sometimes the merchant will switch a product with reviews with a different product. So it looks like it has 1,000 reviews but in reality most reviews are for something else.
  - jruohonen 3y ago
    And then you have the ugly stuff; I remember reading a paper (cannot find it now, though) about fraud rigs through which people can buy fraudsters to promote their products and trash their competitors' products. With AI, that kind of stuff will surely accelerate.
    - dspillett 3y ago
      > With AI, that kind of stuff will surely accelerate. It'll become another war of attrition, like other forms of spam & anti-spam.
    - fny 3y ago
      People need to purchase products to leave reviews, so I doubt AI will run rampant any time soon for reviews.
      - gambiting 3y ago
        On Amazon? That's not true - at least on Amazon UK it definitely isn't, just tried and it lets me write a review for a product I never bought without any problem.
        fny 3y ago
        These reviews don’t contribute to the overall rating and in some cases are shadow banned.
raffraffraff 3y ago
Aren't people en-masse realising that AI, for all its impressive bling, is a stupid blunt instrument? If you've used it for any amount of time you'll know this. Sure, it's a great time-saver, and if you use it wisely it can remove a lot of tedium. But if you're a developer, one thing you'll know is that it cannot replace developers. You still need to structure your whole project yourself, figure out what the data schema needs to look like, and direct the AI tool to do small sections of the work. And you should be ready to sanity check and debug anything it spits out. Similarly with AI image stuff, if you have a bunch of old black & white photos that were taken on a shitty camera in the 1940s, you can get it to upscale, repair, clean and colourize. But if any living person knows any of the subjects in the photographs, be ready for them to laugh their heads off (or get extremely angry) that grandpappy's eyes are not grandpappy's eyes, that they have lost all family resemblance and look more like expertly stuck-on googly eye stickers. Also the colour palettes are wrong for the time, their teeth get magically straightened, their fob-watch chain gets turned into a rope etc. Some of these un-guided AI effects are as bad as their non-AI counterparts, like Affinity Photo's "magic inpainting" that's supposed to let you easily paint out unwanted items in a photo. They look like magic when removing a seagull from a cloudless sky, but they'll make an absolute hames out of anything remotely complex. For example, removing a person from a busy street. Instead of inventing some plausible background to replace them with, it'll just auto-clone their surroundings into the vacuum so you end up with very obviously duplicated features (door handles, street signs etc). This is something that you would never do as a photography professional. So can it save you a bunch of time? Sometimes. Can you rely on it to work without a human in the loop? You're havin' a laugh! Something that all AI tools need to build in is the ability to override their learned data and to curb their enthusiasm for inventing completely wrong detail that was never there. While AI has gotten impressive, I wouldn't trust it to do anything remotely important without a competent human driving it. The biggest problem with AI is that companies that adopt it think that they can fire a bunch of staff and let AI tools run amok.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
  It's blunt if youre using it for dumb shit in the same way that a hammer is a blunt instrument if used to break peoples stuff. If you are using it for highly domain specific knowledge its very good, whether that's protien folding, teaching you some arcane programming language macro, etc.
tetris11 3y ago
> Hopefully a human will respond soon I wonder how quick the transition of HITL (Human in the loop) to HOOTL will be.
- michaelt 3y ago
  There will always be a 'request manual review' button. It'll go to a call centre in the third world where workers are expected to perform a review every 5 seconds.
jasode 3y ago
>My guess would be this is an overzealous AI-generated content detector. Maybe not. If you go by the screenshot of the email from Amazon in the Mastodon link, the book was removed for violating "Community Guidelines" instead of the actual content of the book itself. This is the "Community Guidelines" url in that email: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GLHXEX85MENUE4XF https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... So taking Amazon's reason at face value, it means Amazon thinks the author (or author's friends) manipulated the "community" ... i.e. such as creating fake reviews, 5 stars ratings, etc. An example of tripping the Amazon "community guidelines" algorithm would be something like a suspicious # of reviews coming from different Amazon customers but they're all from the same ip address. As an example of "inadvertently" setting off Amazon's community guidelines detector... if you're going to ask friends & family to leave positive reviews for your book, make sure they don't do it while they're all there at your house for Thanksgiving dinner. In the email, the author offered to take down his reviews in hopes that Amazon would reverse its decision.
- Someone1234 3y ago
  Seems like a nice way of killing a competitor's products.
- mike_d 3y ago
  > So taking Amazon's reason at face value Having dealt directly with managing abuse and handling account terminations, the reason you are told is never the actual reason. As annoying as it is for the 1% of false positives to not get a straight answer, the net effect is the 99% of bad actors don't know what they did to get booted - which means they can't adapt as easily.
  - paledot 3y ago
    Major [citation needed] on that 1%/99% separation there.
    - mike_d 3y ago
      Be my guest: https://www.indeed.com/q-fraud-analyst-l-california-jobs.html https://www.indeed.com/q-fraud-analyst-l-california-jobs.htm...
DennisP 3y ago
Here is Amazon's policy on AI-generated content: > We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text, images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make edits to and republish an existing book through KDP. AI-generated images include cover and interior images and artwork. You are not required to disclose AI-assisted content. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390 https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390 I personally know someone who published about a dozen AI-generated Kindle books before being notified of this policy, and none of it has been removed.
- ghaff 3y ago
  That policy still seems clear as mud if you're using, say, generative AI within Photoshop to help design components of a cover design. I'm also not sure how that's really different from using CC or public domain imagery as part of a design. "AI-generated: We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images, or translations), it is considered "AI-generated," even if you applied substantial edits afterwards." My reading of that is that, if you use AI to create any image even in part, that's AI generated.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  WTF is the difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted. Seems like a very murky distinction.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    I'll give you an example from my recent work. We just released a new app onto the Apple App Store. In order to do this, we need to submit a bunch of screenshots, preview videos, and text. The images and videos, we hand-crafted. A lot of folks automate this, but I think that it's better to hand-craft, if possible, because we need to ensure that specific contexts and whatnot are reflected, and that user privacy is respected. For the text, we developed a fairly dry blurb, and then I asked ChatGPT4 to rewrite. I hit "refresh" a few times, and wrote up a text document with the results, and shared that with the team. We then picked the parts we wanted, and wrote some of our own. None of the ChatGPT-generated summaries was sufficient, on its own merits. We had to cut-and-paste (sometimes changing the order, and changing to make sure that there was consistency), and add our own content, as well.

by cdrini 3y ago

jruohonen 3y ago

That would be my guess too. A few months back they announced a ML model to clean up the reviews, but I'd argue that it is a lost battle; there is so much human-made and now AI-made garbage already. A solution might be a full deletion and then a real identity verification for reviewers.

wil421 3y ago
Sometimes the merchant will switch a product with reviews with a different product. So it looks like it has 1,000 reviews but in reality most reviews are for something else.
- jruohonen 3y ago
  And then you have the ugly stuff; I remember reading a paper (cannot find it now, though) about fraud rigs through which people can buy fraudsters to promote their products and trash their competitors' products. With AI, that kind of stuff will surely accelerate.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    > With AI, that kind of stuff will surely accelerate. It'll become another war of attrition, like other forms of spam & anti-spam.
  - fny 3y ago
    People need to purchase products to leave reviews, so I doubt AI will run rampant any time soon for reviews.
    - gambiting 3y ago
      On Amazon? That's not true - at least on Amazon UK it definitely isn't, just tried and it lets me write a review for a product I never bought without any problem.
      - fny 3y ago
        These reviews don’t contribute to the overall rating and in some cases are shadow banned.

raffraffraff 3y ago

Aren't people en-masse realising that AI, for all its impressive bling, is a stupid blunt instrument? If you've used it for any amount of time you'll know this. Sure, it's a great time-saver, and if you use it wisely it can remove a lot of tedium. But if you're a developer, one thing you'll know is that it cannot replace developers. You still need to structure your whole project yourself, figure out what the data schema needs to look like, and direct the AI tool to do small sections of the work. And you should be ready to sanity check and debug anything it spits out. Similarly with AI image stuff, if you have a bunch of old black & white photos that were taken on a shitty camera in the 1940s, you can get it to upscale, repair, clean and colourize. But if any living person knows any of the subjects in the photographs, be ready for them to laugh their heads off (or get extremely angry) that grandpappy's eyes are not grandpappy's eyes, that they have lost all family resemblance and look more like expertly stuck-on googly eye stickers. Also the colour palettes are wrong for the time, their teeth get magically straightened, their fob-watch chain gets turned into a rope etc. Some of these un-guided AI effects are as bad as their non-AI counterparts, like Affinity Photo's "magic inpainting" that's supposed to let you easily paint out unwanted items in a photo. They look like magic when removing a seagull from a cloudless sky, but they'll make an absolute hames out of anything remotely complex. For example, removing a person from a busy street. Instead of inventing some plausible background to replace them with, it'll just auto-clone their surroundings into the vacuum so you end up with very obviously duplicated features (door handles, street signs etc). This is something that you would never do as a photography professional. So can it save you a bunch of time? Sometimes. Can you rely on it to work without a human in the loop? You're havin' a laugh! Something that all AI tools need to build in is the ability to override their learned data and to curb their enthusiasm for inventing completely wrong detail that was never there. While AI has gotten impressive, I wouldn't trust it to do anything remotely important without a competent human driving it. The biggest problem with AI is that companies that adopt it think that they can fire a bunch of staff and let AI tools run amok.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
It's blunt if youre using it for dumb shit in the same way that a hammer is a blunt instrument if used to break peoples stuff. If you are using it for highly domain specific knowledge its very good, whether that's protien folding, teaching you some arcane programming language macro, etc.

tetris11 3y ago

> Hopefully a human will respond soon I wonder how quick the transition of HITL (Human in the loop) to HOOTL will be.

michaelt 3y ago
There will always be a 'request manual review' button. It'll go to a call centre in the third world where workers are expected to perform a review every 5 seconds.

jasode 3y ago

>My guess would be this is an overzealous AI-generated content detector. Maybe not. If you go by the screenshot of the email from Amazon in the Mastodon link, the book was removed for violating "Community Guidelines" instead of the actual content of the book itself. This is the "Community Guidelines" url in that email: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GLHXEX85MENUE4XF https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... So taking Amazon's reason at face value, it means Amazon thinks the author (or author's friends) manipulated the "community" ... i.e. such as creating fake reviews, 5 stars ratings, etc. An example of tripping the Amazon "community guidelines" algorithm would be something like a suspicious # of reviews coming from different Amazon customers but they're all from the same ip address. As an example of "inadvertently" setting off Amazon's community guidelines detector... if you're going to ask friends & family to leave positive reviews for your book, make sure they don't do it while they're all there at your house for Thanksgiving dinner. In the email, the author offered to take down his reviews in hopes that Amazon would reverse its decision.

Someone1234 3y ago
Seems like a nice way of killing a competitor's products.
mike_d 3y ago
> So taking Amazon's reason at face value Having dealt directly with managing abuse and handling account terminations, the reason you are told is never the actual reason. As annoying as it is for the 1% of false positives to not get a straight answer, the net effect is the 99% of bad actors don't know what they did to get booted - which means they can't adapt as easily.
- paledot 3y ago
  Major [citation needed] on that 1%/99% separation there.
  - mike_d 3y ago
    Be my guest: https://www.indeed.com/q-fraud-analyst-l-california-jobs.html https://www.indeed.com/q-fraud-analyst-l-california-jobs.htm...

DennisP 3y ago

Here is Amazon's policy on AI-generated content: > We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text, images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make edits to and republish an existing book through KDP. AI-generated images include cover and interior images and artwork. You are not required to disclose AI-assisted content. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390 https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390 I personally know someone who published about a dozen AI-generated Kindle books before being notified of this policy, and none of it has been removed.

ghaff 3y ago
That policy still seems clear as mud if you're using, say, generative AI within Photoshop to help design components of a cover design. I'm also not sure how that's really different from using CC or public domain imagery as part of a design. "AI-generated: We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images, or translations), it is considered "AI-generated," even if you applied substantial edits afterwards." My reading of that is that, if you use AI to create any image even in part, that's AI generated.
SoftTalker 3y ago
WTF is the difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted. Seems like a very murky distinction.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  I'll give you an example from my recent work. We just released a new app onto the Apple App Store. In order to do this, we need to submit a bunch of screenshots, preview videos, and text. The images and videos, we hand-crafted. A lot of folks automate this, but I think that it's better to hand-craft, if possible, because we need to ensure that specific contexts and whatnot are reflected, and that user privacy is respected. For the text, we developed a fairly dry blurb, and then I asked ChatGPT4 to rewrite. I hit "refresh" a few times, and wrote up a text document with the results, and shared that with the team. We then picked the parts we wanted, and wrote some of our own. None of the ChatGPT-generated summaries was sufficient, on its own merits. We had to cut-and-paste (sometimes changing the order, and changing to make sure that there was consistency), and add our own content, as well.