-
HAHAHA - We pranked the Frankfurt Book Fair!
We have negotiated with publishers at the Frankfurt book fair about a kind of Spotify model. The aim of our fake start-up: cooperation agreements with publishers that will make them dependent on us in the long term.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023, we introduced a fake AI company – Amazing Books. The cover story: Based on existing literatur, we generate books based on your Amazon shopping cart and the data Amazon has stored about you. We assume that your consumer behavior knows you very well and can adapt stories to you and your life – a completely new approach to literature. So far so fake.
Media fell for the startup
Several media outlets, including dlf and Hessischer Rundfunk, fell for the nonsense company Amazing Books and reported on its product. As these were not investigative pieces but reporting at the book fair, it is not alarming as the company was credibly represented. However, in the general journalistic coverage of AI, it is a shame that hardly any critical questions are asked about company structures, data protection, open source software or other standards.
Open negotiations, hardly any expertise in artificial intelligence
We held talks with specialist managers from over 30 publishers with the aim of obtaining licensed texts to feed into our AI software. We attracted them with a sophisticated copyright token system, which authors and publishers can use to track the text modules used and receive shares. Publishers got involved in negotiations, even though we made it increasingly clear that our company was geared towards driving the publishing world into a state of dependency – as has already happened with Amazon. We wanted to raise the question of how this could actually be…
“We are currently observing the trend of large companies growing unhindered and making us all dependent,” says Luca Wagner, CEO of Amazing Books. “Be it Elon Musk with Twitter, where everyone stays even though it is slipping dangerously to the far right, Amazon with its servers, shipping structures and online trade or Google and Co. We need ways to decentralize power in the economy in the sense of checks and balances.”
The result of the experiment was sobering: of course, the discussions were open-hearted, which is understandable on a personal an professional level in the trade fair context. However, there was no recognizable resistance to the attempt to drive the publishers into a permanent dependency. Rather, it became clear that a disoriented newcomer attitude prevailed.
We must fight back – against powerful companies, not against AI
“I love artificial intelligence, I would love to philosophize about the meaning of life with my toaster over breakfast. But if that doesn’t happen in a charitable way, if we don’t break up Amazon, I’m going to really dislike this toaster,” says Luca Wagner, CEO of Amazing Books.
“The distopia of a highly rational AI that will make people dependent and exploit them as a resource is a projection: this is about perceived powerlessness against big companies.”
We would like to apologize to the lovely people who fell for our prank with bright eyes. We wanted to understand and discover why we are often far too late in organizing against powerful players. They nip a democratic culture in the bud: AI is great, but we should remain resistant to overly centralized structures.
