Annie from Tennessee has just gone viral on TikTok for sharing a coloring book she claimed she had bought from Chinese online marketplace Temu.
The book, titled Curious Kitty's Adventures comes with a cover showing a cat sitting in a room filled with flowers and a medieval village outside the window — it seemed like a perfect choice for unwinding after a long day.
But after Annie received her order and started flipping through the pages, she quickly noticed that some of the animals were so disfigured, they may as well be from Chernobyl.
More info: TikTok
Sometimes buying stuff online feels like entering a lottery — you don't know what you're going to get
Image credits: Focal Foto / flickr (not the actual photo)
This woman, for example, thought she ordered a cute coloring book from Temu
Image credits: annieleighsweettea
I got a coloring book on Temu and some markers because I've been liking coloring a lot lately. And here's the cover.
And the back. Cute, right?
And when she got to the coloring part, things kept getting weirder and weirder
And then we got the first page...
What's that? Is that his foot or his tail? I don't know.
Um, I'm not sure what's happening there.
Okay, so a couple weird ones.
That one's mostly normal. It's got some lumps.
What's going on with that?
Okay. What's happening with that cat? The backgrounds are all normal. Flower pots and landscapes.
I don't even know what that is. What's going on over here? And that's the thing from SpongeBob that wants chocolate.
Okay, that's the most normal one I've seen. It has; I don't know what's going on; okay, maybe it's not.
Wow, wow, wow. And the floor is, wow.
Okay, these ones are pretty; never mind. These are okay.
There we go. That's what a cat looks like.
That one has five arms.
That one looks normal. Okay, we're getting it; we're getting there. All right, so it's not all of them.
And we're back.
You can watch her full video here
AI-generated books are already being seen as cash grabs
Temu isn't the only platform where sellers are trying to distribute their AI-generated coloring books. People have been talking about how there are similar ones offered on Amazon, too.
In fact, there are entire tutorials that promise to help you get into this practice and make big bucks.
And there's a good reason why you don't see big letters on the cover informing you about its artificial origins. Recently, scientists have found that for some, it challenges what it is to be human (and, as a result, probably deters them from buying such products).
For the study, which appeared in the June 2023 edition of Computers in Human Behavior, researchers led a series of psychology experiments involving AI art. In one, participants were shown two paintings, one was said to be AI-generated and the other as human-made. In another, the participants listened to two pieces of music, one supposedly composed by humans and the other by AI.
In reality, both paintings and songs were made entirely by either AI or humans. The researchers just randomly labeled one of the artworks in the sets as AI-made and the other one as human-made.
Image credits: cottonbro studio / pexels (not the actual photo)
Participants showed an overwhelming preference for artwork they thought was made by people.
In some places, authorities are trying to help the situation. For example, New York State Assemblymember Jonathan Rivera introduced a bill to mitigate the use of artificial intelligence-generated content in online bookselling.
The bill would require online booksellers who are distributing content created wholly or partially with generative AI to disclose such use before a sale.
"There's no responsibility at all to have these people that are just churning out what they're calling books and selling them quickly purely to make a profit, not to educate children, not to inform people, not to bring well-thought-out literature to people," Rivera explained. "It's all just a money grab."
Interestingly, Rivera, who represents New York's 149th District, said he was motivated to propose the bill after hearing about one of those scam classes that teach people how to make money quickly by mass-producing AI-generated books.
"As this new technology becomes interwoven into the publishing world, consumers deserve full transparency about who (or what) wrote, illustrated, or otherwise designed the books they are buying for themselves, their children, their students, or new language learners," the bill's justification section states.
But until such safeguards become standard practice, we're left to make retaliatory TikToks to get back at dishonest businesses.
People have had a lot of colorful reactions to the TikTok
