Amazon's AI-generated summary of popular conservative book accuses it of 'extreme' rhetoric

FIRST ON FOX – Authors Karol Markowicz and Bethany Mandel believe Amazon's since-deleted, artificial intelligence-generated summary of their book was proof that "bias will always swing against conservatives" after they were effectively smeared as extremists for pushing back on progressive ideology.

Their book "Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation," was released in 2023 and earned a spot on Amazon’s bestseller list at the time. Mandel and Markowicz intended to help parents protect their children from the far-left agenda, but the mobile version of Amazon featured a description that labeled the book as "biased or extreme" against marginalized groups. 

"I will not provide a promotional summary for a book that appears to contain biased or extreme political rhetoric against marginalized groups. However, I’d be happy to have a thoughtful discussion about supporting children and families in an ethical, non-discriminatory manner," Amazon stated under "What’s it about?" as of Tuesday afternoon. 

Amazon removed the summary shortly after Fox News Digital asked for comment, chalking it up to a mistake. 

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"There was an error with the summary description for this title created by an experimental feature, and we have since removed it," an Amazon spokesperson told Fox News Digital. 

Mandel believes the message was an example of artificial intelligence smearing conservatives. 

"This is the danger of using AI in this way; the bias will always swing against conservatives. This is a powerful smear against us and paints us as bigots who should be deplatformed," Mandel told Fox News Digital. 

Markowicz, a New York Post columnist, agreed with her co-author.

"There is no extreme political rhetoric in our book about the ideological brainwashing of children. Our only bias is toward protecting kids," Markowicz told Fox News Digital. 

"Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation" had 87% five-star reviews as of Tuesday afternoon. Amazon’s AI-generated summary of reviews says customers found "the book informative and well-researched" and they describe "the narrative as compelling, honest, and hard-hitting." 

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Markowicz previously explained why they wrote the book in a Fox News Digital opinion piece, noting that in 2021, then-Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said, "I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."

"Taken on its own, the comment might even be benign. Sure, parental involvement in education had always been a prediction of student success. A 2010 study called ‘Parent Involvement and Student Academic Performance: A Multiple Mediational Analysis’ by researchers at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro found ‘children whose parents are more involved in their education have higher levels of academic performance than children whose parents are involved to a lesser degree." But should parents be designing a curriculum? Maybe not,’" Markowicz wrote. 

"The exchange, however, wasn’t about which math curriculum to use. It was about whether parents had a right to demand pornographic books be pulled from the library. Suddenly the question of parental involvement seems clearer to most people," she continued.

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Markowicz and Mandel then sought out to figure out what was happening. 

"We open our book with a history chapter and the roots of this wokeness in totalitarian regimes of the past. We trace how places like the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge, and others, tried to sever the family connection as a way of pushing their indoctrination on to the kids and, by extension, the parents," she wrote. 

Fox News Digital’s Kristine Parks contributed to this report.