Fable, a popular social media app that bills itself as a paradise for “bookworms and book lovers,” has created an AI-powered end-of-year feature that rounds up the books users read in 2024. It was meant to be fun and entertaining, but some of the summaries they took on a strangely combative tone. For example, writer Danny Groves asked in his recap whether he was “ever in the mood for a straight, cis white man’s perspective” after describing him as a “diversity lover.”
Meanwhile, the summary of Tiana Trammell’s influential book ended with this advice: “Don’t forget to show up for a white author every now and then, okay?”
Trammell was stunned and soon realized she wasn’t alone when she shared her experience with Fable summaries on Threads. “I received a lot of messages,” she says, from people whose summaries included inappropriate comments about “disability and sexual orientation.”
Since Spotify Wrapped’s debut, annual recap features have become ubiquitous on the Internet, providing users with a breakdown of how many books and magazine articles they’ve read, songs they’ve listened to, and workouts they’ve completed. Some companies are now using artificial intelligence to completely create or improve how these metrics are presented. For example, Spotify now offers an AI-generated podcast in which robots analyze your listening history and make guesses about your life based on your preferences. Fable jumped on this trend by using the OpenAI API to generate summaries of its users’ reading habits over the past 12 months, but what it didn’t expect was that the AI model would spit out a comment that looked like the face of an anti-wake-up expert.
Fable later apologized on several social media channels, including Threads and Instagram, where it followed published a video the executive body issuing the mea culpa. “We are very sorry for the pain some of our reader summaries have caused this week,” the company wrote in the caption. “We will do better.”
For some users, adapting the AI does not seem like an appropriate response. Fantasy and romance writer AR Kaufer was horrified when she saw screenshots of some of the summaries on social media. “They have to say that they are completely abandoning artificial intelligence. They must also issue a statement not only about artificial intelligence, but also an apology to those affected by this situation,” Kaufer says. “This ‘apology’ on Threads seems disingenuous as it mentions that the app is ‘funny,’ as if it somehow justifies racist/sexist/ablistic quotes.” In response to the incident, Kaufer decided to delete her Fable account.
Likewise Trammell. “The appropriate course of action would be to disable this feature and conduct rigorous internal testing, including newly implemented safeguards that will, to the extent possible, ensure that no subsequent users of the platform are at risk of harm,” he says.