During the summer holidays, beware of the fake travel guides that abound on Amazon! Scammers are using AI to craft them and mount a most sophisticated scam. Authors, 5-star reviews… Everything is wrong!
With the popularization of generative artificial intelligences like ChatGPT, it didn’t take long before some were looking to exploit this technology for their own ends, sometimes to the detriment of any ethics. Whether it’s cybercriminals flooding Facebook with ads and pages for fake ChatGPT, Google Bard and other chatbots (see our article) or influencers and so-called experts posting videos or selling “get-rich-quick” training , all means are good ! And that’s not counting the smart guys who have decided to have their books written entirely by ChatGPT, overwhelming publishers and e-book sales platforms like Amazon (see our article).
And as much to say that they do not hesitate to take consumers for idiots! The latest trend? Take advantage of the summer holidays to sell fake travel guides written by AI on Jeff Bezos’ platform. Presented as works written by renowned authors, they are in fact heaps of platitudes and clichés, with certain paragraphs copied directly from Wikipedia. In order to complete the illusion, scammers do not hesitate to deceive Internet users with the help of fake Amazon reviews, written by bots, giving products five stars and praising them. A way to properly reference tourist guides, but also to build trust and fool the buyer. All they have to do then is sell them via its print-on-demand system.
Fake travel guides: scams that rely on AI
This is what happened to an American who wanted to stay in France. By typing “travel guide France” in the Amazon search bar, she found a very well rated book, with an average of 4.4/5 for about forty reviews, written by a certain Mikes Steves. He presents himself as a renowned writer who has produced many travel guides over the years. She lets herself be seduced and goes to the checkout. Once the work in hand, it’s the cold shower. The text is filled with banalities and looks like a collection of paragraphs straight from Wikipedia. As for Mikes Steves, he is nowhere to be found on the Internet. None of the articles he is supposed to have written for prestigious journals exist, and his photo has all the flaws of an artificially generated portrait. It is simply a pseudonym, a face, to hide the fact that the guide was written by an AI.
The New York Times used tools to analyze various suspicious travel guides. He used Originality.ai, which rates the likelihood that an AI wrote a passage on a scale of 0 to 100, and Fakespot, a browser extension that flags potentially “misleading” reviews and rates them from A to F. All books and journals rated by the media have been classified as probably fake or written by artificial intelligence. He also analyzed 35 paragraphs of the famous guide, all of which obtained a 100% probability of being written by an AI.
Asked by the New York Times, Amazon replied that the firm “was spending a lot of time and resources to ensure that [ses] content rules are followed and books that do not adhere to them are removed”. Still, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing content guidelines don’t prevent users from generating content using AI as long as it meets its other regulations. Also, to avoid being fooled, do not hesitate to look at negative reviews, even if many reviews are five stars. You should also check the author’s photo carefully for signs of AI generation, such as blurry backgrounds or strange distortions. Finally, do not hesitate to do a quick Internet search of the author, to see if his previous works and his references exist. Vigilance is key!