Amazon: A CautionAIry Tale

Here’s the cover of Simon Hart’s candid, shocking, funny (and excellent) political diaries:

And here’s the cover of what certainly looked like Simon Hart’s candid, shocking, funny (and excellent) political diaries when I was searching for a digital  copy on Amazon:

Angry beyond belief as the realisation dawned on me that I’d been duped into buying an AI knock-off, I broke a lifetime vow and submitted a review to Amazon. “Shame on you, Amazon,” it probably said, “for misleading your customers by hosting such AI-generated garbage.” I could have gone on, “How dare you…,” etc. I don’t know because I didn’t keep a copy and Amazon rejected the review for “not meeting community guidelines.” Which I took to mean, "being overly critical” of the poor defenceless tech behemoth. I rewrote the review, toned it down a bit and substituted a lower case ‘L’ for the ‘I’ in AI, thinking that I might fool the algorithm.

Did it work? We’ll never know. To its credit, Amazon was swift in pulling the title from its site (nothing to see here!) and refunding my money.

I just wish they’d be more diligent in checking first time around.

This 30-page (!) AI paperback is listed at £12.99:

Or 31 AI pages for £15.99 (£7.99 for the Kindle version)

£18.99 or £8.99 for AI content for your Kindle — literally seconds of pleasure:

And this one, which looks suspiciously like the one that I was conned into buying and Amazon pulled:

Anyway, I’ve snitched on them all to Amazon, so let’s see what it does.(Since writing this, another one's appeared, but you get the idea.)

Meanwhile, buyer beware! Or buyer visit proper bookshops, perhaps.