Diana Carney biography likely written by AI sparks conspiracy claims
The post includes an apparent screenshot of a product page for a book about Diana Fox Carney on the commerce website Amazon.
"Notice she is called First Lady of Canada. How the hell 26 days before the election, obviously the fix was in," text reshared in a similar May 5 Facebook post said.
Different users across X, Instagram and TikTok shared images of the same supposed biography with claims that its April 2 publication date, three weeks after Mark Carney took office on March 14, was evidence the couple had prior knowledge he would win his bid to become prime minister.
Both husband and wife have been targets of misinformation claims since Mark Carney entered the race to lead the ruling Liberals following the resignation of former prime minister Justin Trudeau in January.
After winning the leadership contest and taking office as head of government, Mark Carney called a snap election for April 28 which precipitated multiple claims of fraud despite all parties accepting the results which show the Liberal Party winning the most seats and no evidence of widespread issues impacting the vote (archived here).
With some alleging the Diana Fox Carney book shows "the globalist narrative playbook in action," the recent claims appear to build off conspiracy theories which point to Mark Carney's ties (archived here) to the World Economic Forum as evidence the couple is connected to a supposed circle of nefarious elites.
However, the text, which is no longer available on Amazon, has a very high likelihood of being generated by artificial intelligence, experts say.
The Ontario-based AI-detection firm, Originality.ai, shared its analysis of excerpts from the book and its summary with AFP. All of the samples scored 100 percent on the scale the company uses to quantify confidence that content is AI-generated (archived here, here and here).
"This incident is a perfect example of how quickly generative tools can fabricate convincing‑looking 'biographies' around public figures," said Jon Gillham, the CEO and founder of Originality.ai, in an email May 6.
Furthermore, samples of the book do not indicate any participation by Diana Fox Carney in its publication.
Some posts claim Diana Fox Carney was attempting to grab titles that do not exist by styling herself as the "First Lady of Canada" in the biography's title. The role of the Canadian head of government's spouse is less formalized than in countries such as the United States, with Trudeau's ex-wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, previously referred to as the "unofficial first lady of Canada" (archived here).
Gillham said that such a misnomer was further proof the text was invented by artificial intelligence, which can generate inaccuracies in its answers to a prompt.
Jane Friedman, a writer covering the publishing industry (archived here), said another clue was the sheer number of books the biography's author, "Victor C. Hopkins," shared in such a short time period. Currently, the author page lists 14 texts about different political figures, all published since the beginning of April (archived here).
"It's laughable," Friedman said.
AFP was not able to locate a website or contact a page for "Victor C. Hopkins" to find more information about the supposed writer.
The Diana Fox Carney biography does not appear to be a unique case, with Friedman saying there are "vast numbers of such books published every day."
"It was absolutely dropped onto Amazon to capitalize off current interest in the PM and news headlines," she said.
During Canada's federal election campaign, Bloomberg covered a deluge of "strange" AI-generated books on Canadian politics flooding Amazon.
Additional social media posts shared conspiratorial claims about the Carneys featuring books with different titles and author names, such as "Victor P. Johnston."
Friedman said it falls to Amazon to act as AI-generated content spreads on its platform.
Amazon spokesman Tim Gillman told AFP in a May 7 email content guidelines exist "governing which books can be listed for sale, and we have proactive and reactive methods that help us detect content that violates our guidelines, whether AI-generated or not."
Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon's e-book platform, requires authors verify their identity (archived here). Publishers must also disclose when content is AI-generated but this information is not currently available to customers (archived here).
Keyword searches reveal several other Diana Fox Carney biographies with similar titles were also removed from Amazon (archived here and here), but at least one is still available at the time of publication (archived here).
Read more of AFP's reporting on misinformation in Canada here.
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