Incident 590: Alleged ChatGPT-Generated Book with a Duplicate Title, Fake Author, and Similar Content Surfaces on Amazon Ahead of Real Author's Book Release

Description: The author Chris Cowell had spent more than a year writing his book "Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines" when, three weeks before its release, another book appeared bearing the exact title by an author (Marie Karpos) for whom no information could be found. The book appeared to have been written by ChatGPT. While the original Washington Post story does not say so, it is possible the name and description were taken from the Amazon preorder page.

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Alleged: OpenAI and ChatGPT developed an AI system deployed by InKstall and Marie Karpos, which harmed Chris Cowell.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

590

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Incident Date

2023-02-03

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He wrote a book on a rare subject. Then a ChatGPT replica appeared on Amazon.

washingtonpost.com

washingtonpost.com · 2023

Chris Cowell, a Portland, Ore.-based software developer, spent more than a year writing a technical how-to book. Three weeks before it was released, another book on the same topic, with the same title, appeared on Amazon.

"My first thought …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.