A book app that uses AI to “roast” its users has become an anti-woke instead

Myth, popular Social media application Describing itself as a haven for “book lovers and nerds,” it created an AI-powered end-of-year summary feature that summarizes what book users read in 2024. It was meant to be fun and entertaining, but some of the summaries took on a weird, combative tone. For example, writer Danny Groves’ summary asked if he was “ever in the mood for a straight, white, cis male perspective” after describing him as a “diversity lover.”

Meanwhile, book influencer Tiana Trammell’s summary ended with the following advice: “Don’t forget to pop up a white author once in a while, okay?”

Reader summary as shown on the 2024 statistics page of the Fable app.

Courtesy of Tiana Trammell

Trammell was flabbergasted, and quickly realized she wasn’t alone after sharing her experience with Fable recaps on Threads. “I have received multiple messages from people whose summaries inappropriately commented on ‘disability and sexual orientation,’” she says.

Since its first appearance Spotify wrappedyearly summary features have become ubiquitous across the Internet, providing users with a summary of how many books and news articles they have read, songs they have listened to, and exercises they have completed. Some companies are now using AI to fully produce or enhance how these metrics are presented. Spotify, for example, now offers Podcast generated by artificial intelligence Where robots analyze your listening history and guess your life based on your taste. Fable jumped on the trend by using OpenAI’s API to generate summaries of its users’ reading habits over the past 12 months, but it didn’t anticipate that the AI ​​model would issue commentary that took the form of anti-woke critics. .

Fable later apologized on several social media channels, including Threads and Instagram, where it did so I posted a video From an executive who issues a decision Mea culpa. “We are deeply sorry for the hurt some of our reader summaries have caused this week,” the company wrote in the caption. “We will do better.”

Kimberly Marsh Alley, Fable’s community lead, told WIRED that the company is working on a series of changes to improve its AI summaries, including an opt-out option for people who don’t want them and clearer disclosures that they are AI. I was born. “For now, we’ve removed the part of the form that bothers the reader, and instead the form simply summarizes the user’s taste in books,” she says.

For some users, adjusting the AI ​​doesn’t seem like a sufficient response. Fantasy and romance writer R. Coover was flabbergasted when she saw screenshots of some of the synopses on social media. “They should say they’re getting rid of AI completely. They should issue a statement, not just about AI, but an apology to those affected.” This ‘apology’ on Threads seems insincere, as mentioning the app is as if it’s ‘hilarious’ It somehow justifies racist/sexist/ableist quotes.” In response to the incident, Cover decided to delete her Fable account.

So did Trammell. “The appropriate course of action is to disable the feature, conduct rigorous internal testing, and incorporate newly implemented safeguards to ensure, to the best of their ability, that no other users of the platform are harmed,” it says.