by Anura Guruge
on June 23, 2021
This was in my e-mail this morning. It did make me smile.
Of course I was going to like it. I wrote it. My first book. Unlikely that I would not like it.
So, what was Amazon’s AI thinking?
That, alas, is always the problem with AI (& I speak as one who was into AI in the 1970s & 1980s). AI still has to be taught …
So, the AI algorithms here do not appear to check who the author is.
Yes, us authors are still a minority compared to the millions who buy books. So, the chances of Amazon’s AI recommending an author’s own book to the author are rare. But, it would only take a few lines of code to stop it.
I know why I got the recommendation. A couple of weeks ago I was searching for this book on Amazon because I wanted to grab the cover image for my new ‘book’ page. That was all that Amazon saw. That I had searched for it. That I was the author did not cross its ‘mind’. That, alas, is still the pitfall of AI. The mind is so hard to emulate.
