"His screenshot shows a listing for a "self-help" paperback book listed for one dollar less than the kindle version of Doctorow's. Everything about the knockoff appears to have been hastily copy and pasted from an AI chatbot, with even the title a bloated mess of SEO-buzzwords: "The Key Understanding You Get from Enshittification Workbook - How to Execute Cory Doctorow's Plan for Reclaiming the Internet, Fighting Platform Decay, and Escaping the Digital Trap for Good.""
"The product description isn't much better, exhibiting further signs of a slapdash ChatGPT job: "The Internet Didn't Just Get Worse - It Was Engineered to Collapse," it opens. "You feel it every time you open an app that used to feel magical but now just feels predatory... This isn't accidental. It's enshittification - and Cory Doctorow gave it a name because you were never meant to see it.""
Amazon listings surfaced that replicate a forthcoming title, with at least one AI-generated knockoff listed days before the official release. The knockoffs used inflated SEO-heavy titles and cheaply copied AI text in descriptions, pricing a paperback lower than the official Kindle to undercut sales. The issue was publicly flagged via a screenshot shared on X, calling out the platform's poor quality assurance. The listings illustrate how automated content and opportunistic sellers exploit marketplace vulnerabilities to monetize and mislead consumers, demonstrating real-world platform degradation driven by algorithmic incentives and weak moderation.
Read at Futurism
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]