05-05-2025
Amazon has books on managing ADHD produced using AI and giving 'dangerous advice', scientist says
Amazon is selling books marketed at people seeking techniques to manage their ADHD that claim to offer expert advice yet appear to be authored by a chatbot such as ChatGPT.
Amazon's marketplace has been deluged with works produced by artificial intelligence that are easy and cheap to publish but include unhelpful or dangerous misinformation, such as shoddy travel guidebooks and mushroom foraging books that encourage risky tasting.
A number of books have appeared on the online retailer's site offering guides to ADHD that also seem to be written by chatbots. The titles include Navigating ADHD in Men: Thriving with a Late Diagnosis; Men with Adult ADHD: Highly Effective Techniques for Mastering Focus; Time Management and Overcoming Anxiety; and Men with Adult ADHD Diet & Fitness.
Samples from eight books were examined by a US company that detects content produced by artificial intelligence. The company said each had a rating of 100% on its AI detection score, meaning its systems were highly confident the books were written by a chatbot.
Michael Cook, a computer science researcher at King's College London, said generative AI systems were known to give dangerous advice, for example around ingesting toxic substances, mixing together dangerous chemicals or ignoring health guidelines.
As such, it is 'frustrating and depressing to see AI-authored books increasingly popping up on digital marketplaces' particularly on health and medical topics, which could result in misdiagnosis or worsen conditions, he said.
'Generative AI systems like ChatGPT may have been trained on a lot of medical textbooks and articles, but they've also been trained on pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and fiction,' he said.
'They also can't be relied on to critically analyse or reliably reproduce the knowledge they've previously read — it's not as simple as having the AI 'remember' things that they've seen in their training data."
Richard Wordsworth was hoping to learn about his recent adult ADHD diagnosis when his father recommended a book he found on Amazon after searching 'ADHD adult men'.
When he sat down to read it, 'immediately, it sounded strange', he said. The book opened with a quote from the conservative psychologist Jordan Petersen and then contained a string of random anecdotes, as well as historical inaccuracies.
Some advice was actively harmful, he observed. For example, one chapter discussing emotional dysregulation warned friends and family did not 'forgive the emotional damage you inflict. The pain and hurt caused by impulsive anger leave lasting scars."
When he researched the author, he spotted a headshot that looked AI-generated, plus a lack of qualifications. He searched several other titles in the Amazon marketplace and was shocked to encounter warnings his condition was 'catastrophic' and he was 'four times more likely to die significantly earlier'.
An Amazon spokesperson said: 'We have content guidelines 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. We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines."
The Guardian
