The issue of AI-written garbage on Amazon is one that is likely only in its infancy. Given Amazon’s recent $50 billion investment into OpenAI, and the deeply unwelcome infiltration of its pisspoor in-built AI helper Rufus, the site hardly seems poised to defend itself from slop books becoming an ever-more present feature. And if there’s one example of just how farcical this situation is becoming, it’s the appearance of AI-delusion “guidebooks” for unfinished, unreleased games.
This phenomenon has been superbly written about on Substack site Rick’s Game Blacklog, where on searching Amazon to learn game release dates, the author instead found listings for expensive guidebooks for the likes of Alien: Isolation 2 (release date unknown), Control: Resonant (release date September 24) and Gear (sic) of War: E-Day (October 6), all available to buy right now!
Each book’s cover is AI-generated and accompanied by AI-written blurbs, and in case you were left in any doubt, Rick’s Game Backlog points out that the text for Gear of War (official title: Gear of War E-Day Game Guide: Tactical Breakdown of Conflict, Characters, and Urban Survival Systems) unimprovably begins:
Here is a high-converting Amazon-style book description crafted to sell your book while keeping it emotionally engaging, persuasive, and read-focused.
Well I’m persuaded!
Thankfully for us, heroic Rick ordered a couple of these books for himself, and has posted examples of what lies within. And it’s glorious. It’s glorious before it even begins in fact, with a table of contents that’s printed as a series of hyperlinks and without page numbers. The guidebook then doesn’t even pretend to be, well, a guidebook, laid out like a novel and lacking any pictures. 60-ish pages of AI-written lore based on the Gears of War‘s Wikipedia are followed by a series of chapters providing “guides” for features that absolutely aren’t going to be in the game, like “Survival Mechanics” and “Psychological Warfare.”
Meanwhile, the Alien: Isolation 2 book has a whole chapter devoted to the as-yet unrevealed system requirements! A novel-like chapter! Rick’s Game Backlog called Amazon’s customer support and had the books flagged and taken down. But they’re right back up again.
Prima Content
Genuine gaming guidebooks can be released before a game is out. I know people who write them, and they’re given incredibly advanced access to incomplete versions of the games such that they can be meticulously broken down and explained, laid out, and published in time for the game’s launch. But these are something else entirely: entirely hallucinated tomes of gibberish based on plagiarizing online information about a game. And it’s a smart con, too, given Amazon’s propensity to promote associated items if you’ve pre-ordered a copy of any of these games. At $20 or more, it’s not a cheap trick to fall for, too. The cover images are pretty convincing at a glance, and a parent looking to pick up a kid a gift, or just a regular games player having it show up in their Amazon recommendations, could very easily and innocently fall for it.
The same sorts of AI-slop guides are also listed for released games, like this Lies of P book from the same “author” behind the Alien: Isolation 2 entry, George D. Brogon, or prolific guidebot Donald C. Campbell and his guides for The Adventures of Elliot, Mina the Hollower, and Star Fox. (My favorite thing about all of these and many others is that they all contain a variation of the phrase “Step into the world of…” in their AI-bilge descriptions. God AI sucks so hard.)
Rick gets into where quality guides can be found, as well as a lot more in-depth mocking of the drivel he discovered, and it’s well-worth a read.