The Challenge of Detecting AI-Generated Books: Should Amazon Take Responsibility?

Others startups of the sector share this high level of trust. “Without a doubt, we can provide the technology to the platforms of ecommerce and we are currently in the middle of conversations to do so with several suppliers,” says Jonathan White, chief of staff at GPTZero.

Meanwhile, John Renaud, founder of Winston AI, which already has several publishers among its clients, also maintains that his company could “absolutely” equip e-commerce platforms like Amazon to detect ebooks generated by AI.

A growing chorus of voices from the publishing world believes that Amazon and other bookstores online They have a responsibility to at least try to inform their customers whether the books they are consulting were written by humans or machines.

“Amazon has an ethical obligation to disclose this information. Authors and publishers should already do this, but if this is not the case, Amazon has to require it, along with all retailers and distributors,” highlights Jane Friedman. “By not doing so, as an industry we are fostering mistrust and confusion. The author and the book will begin to lose the considerable authority they have hitherto enjoyed.”

“We have advocated for legislation that requires material generated by AI to be flagged as such by platforms or publishers, across the board,” highlights Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the US Authors Guild.

There is an obvious incentive for Amazon to do this: “They want their customers to be happy,” Rasenberger stresses, “and when someone buys a book thinking it was written by a human and receives something AI-generated that is not quality, they will not feel glad”.

Is it possible to know if a book was written by an AI?

So why isn’t the company using AI detection tools? Why wait for the authors to reveal if they used it? When WIRED asked directly if they were looking into proactively labeling AI-generated works, the company declined to respond. Instead, company spokesperson Ashley Vanicek provided a written statement about the company’s updated guidelines and volume limits for self-published authors. “Amazon constantly evaluates emerging technologies and is committed to providing the best possible buying, reading and publishing experience for authors and customers,” Vanicek added.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Amazon isn’t interested in this type of technology, just that it’s keeping quiet about any deliberations going on behind the scenes. There are several reasons why the company approaches AI detection with caution. For starters, there is skepticism about the accuracy of the results of these tools.

In March, researchers at the University of Maryland published a paper in which They criticized the inaccuracy of AI detectors; “they are not reliable in practical situations,” they wrote. And in July, Stanford researchers presented a paper highlighting that the detectors show a bias against authors whose native language is not English.

2023-09-28 22:37:19
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