Google Books Appears to Be Indexing Works Written by AI

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Misinformation (Pollution of information ecosystem and loss of consensus reality) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

• India DPDP Act India · Partially applicable · binding
• Law on Artificial Intelligence (2025) Kazakhstan · Adopted · binding
• Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence Italy · In force · binding
• EU AI Act European Union · Partially applicable · binding
• Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA) Texas (United States) · In force · binding

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (1)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

1. 5 Apr 2024
   Google Books reportedly indexing bad AI-written works

   theverge.com · Emilia David

Who was involved

Alleged deployer

Google, Google Books

Alleged developer

Google

Alleged harmed party

Google Books, Google Ngram Viewer, Researchers, General Public

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Risk domain

Misinformation

Risk subdomain

3.2 Pollution of information ecosystem and loss of consensus reality

Causal entity

AI

Intent

Unintentional

Timing

Post-deployment

Harm level

—

Sectors

—

Countries

—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 3.2.

• Information degradation

  "Information degradation - Creation or spread of false, hallucinatory, low-quality, misleading, or inaccurate information that degrades the information ecosystem and causes people to develop false or inaccurate perceptio...

  A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

• Institutional trust loss

  "Institutional trust loss - Erosion of trust in public institutions and weakened checks and balances due to mis/disinformation, influence operations, over-dependence on technology, etc."

  A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

• Radicalisation

  "Radicalisation - Adoption of extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations due to the nature or misuse of an algorithmic system, potentially resulting in abuse, violence, or terrorism."

  A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

• Widespread use of persuasive tools contributes to splintered epistemic communities

  "Even without deliberate misuse, widespread use of powerful persuasion tools could have negative impacts. If such tools were used by many different groups to advance many different ideas, we could see the world splinteri...

  A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023)

• Reduced decision-making capacity as a result of decreased trust in information

  "In addition, the increased awareness of these trends in information production and distribution could make it harder for anyone to evaluate the trustworthiness of any information source, reducing overall trust in inform...

  A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023)

• Worsened epistemic processes for society

  "Epistemic processes and problem solving: we currently see more reasons to be concerned about AI worsening society's epistemic processes than reasons to be optimistic about AI helping us better solve problems as a societ...

  A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023)

• AI contributes to increased online polarisation

  "One of the most significant commercial uses of current AI systems is in the content recommendation algorithms of social media companies, and there are already concerns that this is contributing to worsened polarisation...

  A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023)

• Degradation of the information environment

  "Frontier AI can cheaply generate realistic content which can falsely portray people and events. There is potential risk of compromised decision-making by individuals and institutions who rely on inaccurate or misleading...

  Capabilities and Risks from Frontier AI (DSIT2023)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

• 30 Nov 2022Uptick in Low-Quality AI-Produced Content Degraded Publishers' Submission Management
• 6 Dec 2021Korean Politician Employed Deepfake as Campaign Representative
• 10 Jul 2019Facebook Political Ad Delivery Algorithms Inferred Users' Political Alignment, Inhibiting Political Campaigns' Reach