Thread by @sahiltner

THREAD: Shoddy guidebooks, promoted with deceptive reviews, have flooded Amazon in recent months. Their authors claim to be renowned travel writers — but do they even exist? Or are they A.I. inventions? nytimes.com/2023/08/05/tra…

@sethkugel and I spent the last few weeks investigating the phony books, and we made some surprising discoveries. First of all, the scale of the problem is dizzying.

Consider a single book: “France Travel Guide,” published in March by Mike Steves, who, according to his biography on Amazon, is a “renowned European travel writer.”

At first glance, the Amazon listing for the book looks legitimate.

But things start to look fishy on the “About the Author” page. We couldn’t find any of Mike Steves’s previously published work. Nor could we find any records of his home or family in Edmonds, Wash. — which happens to be the home of the acclaimed travel writer Rick Steves.

We ran the biography through an artificial intelligence detector from . It scored 100 — meaning it was almost certainly produced by A.I. We also ran 35 passages from the book through the detector. All 35 passages scored a perfect 100.Originality.ai

And take a closer look at the author photo. See the anomalies near the ear and shoulder? Those suggest that the image itself was created with generative A.I.

Even the book’s positive reviews are bogus: generic, off-topic or nonsensical.

The book, in other words, seems to be a total fake from top to bottom.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read the full article, where we discuss the risks and ramifications and delve much deeper into these issues. If nothing else, you might appreciate the perspective of the real Mr. Steves — Rick Steves, that is, who weighed in on the matter.

Here’s a gift link that will get you past the @nytimes’s paywall: nytimes.com/2023/08/05/tra…