A popular book app is being slammed for some "bigoted and racist" messages to its users.
The popular social media app Fable, which describes itself as a home for “bookworms and binge watchers,” recently pushed out an AI-powered end of the year summary feature like Spotify Wrapped. Instead of songs, though, it recapped the books that its users read last year.
It was meant to have a fun “roast” feature that made each recap be playful, but these “roasts” turned out to be much more sinister. Wired reports that writer Danny Groves’ recap asked him if he’s "ever in the mood for a straight, cis white man’s perspective” once it labeled him a “diversity devotee.”
He isn’t the only one with a borderline racist response. Another book influencer, Tiana Trammell, received a similarly wild response: “Don’t forget to surface for the occasional white author, okay?”
Fable has since apologized. In an apology video posted to Threads and Instagram, a company spokesperson detailed the situation.
“We got a couple reports from users about our reader summary feature on the profile using very bigoted and racist language,” said the spokesperson. “That was shocking to us.
“To know that that feature has generated negative language it’s a sad situation,” he continued. “First of all, we are deeply sorry for the harm that we’ve caused in the community that’s been generated and putting out a feature that can do something like that.”
To address the situation, the company is already at work on implementing changes. Fable’s head of community, Kimberly Marsh Allee, reportedly told Wired that it’s improving AI summaries and including an opt-out option for people that don’t want them.
“For the time being, we have removed the part of the model that playfully roasts the reader, and instead the model simply summarizes the user’s taste in books,” she added.
Following Wired's report on the controversy, head of Fable operations Marsh Allee told the publication that the app company was immediately removing AI-generated 2024 readings summaries.
