Report: “Google Books Indexes AI Trash”

From a 404 Media Media Report by Emanuel Maiberg:

Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history.

I was able to find the AI-generated books with the same method we’ve previously used to find AI-generated Amazon product reviews, papers published in academic journals, and online articles. Searching Google Books for the term “As of my last knowledge update,” which is associated with ChatGPT-generated answers, returns dozens of books that include that phrase. Some of the books are about ChatGPT, machine learning, AI, and other related subjects and include the phrase because they are discussing ChatGPT and its outputs. These books appear to be written by humans. However, most of the books in the first eight pages of results turned up by the search appear to be AI-generated and are not about AI.

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These AI-generated books are very similar to the type of AI-generated books we’ve found on Amazon, and in fact, many of the books appear on both Amazon and Google Play Books. But one unintended outcome of Google Books indexing AI-generated text is its possible future inclusion in Google Ngram viewer.

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