By The End Of The Night
Amazon pens a new AI nightmare; marquee CX panel to take Vegas stage Wednesday
The UK’s Ellie Goulding has been an outstanding pop singer and songwriter for over a decade. She’s been the definition of consistency since she arrived, notching hit after hit after hit.
This latest single, “By The End Of The Night,” doubles as not just as excellent music, but an apt metaphor for the current ambiguity shrouding the world of AI.
I maintain a foot in the book publishing world, via our Digital Book World business. And, in promotion of Digital Book World 2024 in January, I had the privilege of speaking with Jane Friedman as my podcast guest just last week.
Jane Friedman writes a newsletter called The Hot Sheet that the entire industry reads. She is as respected as they come and her commentary is essential to that space.
I wrapped up my conversation with her (along with Pozotron CEO Adam Fritz) on Friday morning, and soon after, Jane would make a surprising discovery:
GoodReads is a literary community and website designed to make discovery of new books easier. That books an author didn’t write could be attributed to them, published through Amazon and then automatically linked to one’s profile on GoodReads, is diametrically opposed to the entire reason the website exists.
It didn’t take long for Friedman to figure out AI was involved.
Jane Friedman’s article, in which she explains how she’d rather her books be pirated than be helplessly caught up in a vortex of AI fakery she can’t escape, instantly went viral.
But wait…there’s more!
Amazon informed Friedman that sorry, can’t remove the books! You didn’t work hard enough to prove who you were! Too bad.
Again, Jane Friedman is as well known and well liked of a celebrity as there is in the publishing world.
If Amazon is telling her to suck it up and simply deal with AI writing books under her name, selling them, and obfuscating everything about Friedman’s carefully crafted online persona in the process…imagine what they’d tell you or me!
Amazon seemed to come to its senses over the course of the next day:
After Friedman kept banging the gong over and over and over again, and having the mainstream press start to pick up on the story, Amazon decided it had had enough and began to correct some of these wrongs.
You can imagine the stress someone like Friedman went through in the days and nights since discovering AI-enabled fraudsters had hijacked her good name to publish books ripping off her content. Every hour that went by, in which Amazon failed to respond, was a new and unnecessary offense.
This is simply the very latest in a very long line of episodes demanding some form of due process is created to assist those who believe their rights have been violated by AI systems and tools.
While one would expect such a framework to be made available by Amazon, the vast ocean of AI startups have no such compulsion and are, in fact, incentivized to violate IP rights in an effort to gain visibility and attention in a crowded marketplace.
There’s a cautionary tale in all of this on what’s coming with AI-created content unless we get our hands around all of this. Multiply this story by 100,000 and that’s what you’ll have unless there’s regulation, and quickly.
I’ll take the stage in Vegas tomorrow to moderate a marquee CX panel at Ai4 2023, featuring personnel from Toyota North America, Capital One, Foot Locker, and AI startup Yobi.
This kicks off about half a dozen speaking appearances across the US over the rest of the calendar year. I’ll document some of them here, but I always enjoy meeting up with newsletter readers on the road. Reach out if you’re around.
Save the dates (April 22-24) for Project Voice’s annual conference, taking place in its home of Chattanooga, Tennessee and attracting the best-in-class companies and veterans across the conversational AI landscape.
We announced this past week that M12, Microsoft’s venture capital fund, has joined the conference program, joining the Center for AI Digital Policy and the Washington Post’s Chief Technology Officer as opening keynotes.
Registration for Project Voice 2024: The Pillars of Conversational AI is here.
