Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage

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. From a report: 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.

For example, the 2024 book Bears, Bulls, and Wolves: Stock Trading for the Twenty-Year-Old by Tristin McIver, bills itself as 'a transformative journey into the world of stock trading' and 'a comprehensive guide designed for beginners eager to unlock the mysteries of financial markets.' In reality, it reads like ChatGPT-generated text with surface, Wikipedia-level analysis of complex financial events like Facebook's initial public offering or the 2008 financial crisis summed up in a few short paragraphs. Other books appear to be outdated to the point of being useless at the time they are published because they are generated with a version of ChatGPT with an old 'knowledge update.'

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