Fake AI biographies of SNP leaders removed from Amazon
Amazon is apparently removing the books from its site, including a further biography of former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, which claimed her family 'placed a high cost on education, difficulty painting and public service' and that her 'mom' became a 'nearby press flesher'.
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There are now growing fears about the influence of AI on the 2026 Scottish Parliament election – with fake AI biographies during Canada's election earlier this year leading to rampant disinformation on social media
Sam Stockwell, a research associate for the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security at the Alan Turing Institute in London, told The Times: 'As generative AI becomes more accessible, many users can now automate professionalised descriptions and even full-length books of politicians using the immense amount of data these tools scrape from the internet on such individuals.
'Since text also lacks more obvious cues compared to videos or images which allow users to determine whether it is authentic or generated by AI, there is a risk that these AI-generated biographies could have a more persuasive effect on those who read them.'
He added: 'With Scottish elections looming next year, one of the main concerns here is that threat actors [people or entities causing harm via the internet] could seek to undermine the reputation of political candidates by uploading fake biographies which include harmful, fabricated claims.
'Perhaps most worryingly, an absence of any labels or information indicating that these texts are AI-generated makes it more challenging for users to be aware of when they may be consuming such content.'
(Image: Jacob King/PA Wire)
Morgan Currie, a lecturer in data and society at the University of Edinburgh, said: 'Amazon clearly needs better mechanisms for catching 'AI slop' biographies, of political figures or otherwise, and [to] swiftly act when they are reported.
'They stand to benefit from anyone naively downloading or buying something like this, and they are partly culpable for any political harms that could come from it.
'My worry is less about upcoming elections than about the more low-grade, slow erosion of general civic literacy, especially if these works become more sophisticated.
'For example, I notice that the John Swinney biography is geared towards young people. It has a stated reading age at 14 to 18 years old, so there is a chance that young people will purchase material like this and learn and propagate erroneous information from it.'
She added: 'It does raise the threat here that inaccurate AI slop could become data that future AI recursively learns from, with the potential to perpetuate falsehoods through self-training.
'We already know that Russian propaganda is being deliberately formatted to corrupt Gen AI models.
'You could see these biographies being similarly churned out and weaponised for political purposes.'
In response, Amazon said: 'We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale, and we have proactive and reactive methods that help us detect content that violates our guidelines, whether AI-generated or not. We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed, and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines.'
The Scottish Government said: 'This is not an accredited biography of the first minister and many of the claims in this book are untrue.
'People should be aware of the risk of misinformation and disinformation online.'
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