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Incident 882: AI-Generated Reading Summaries on Fable App Reportedly Wrote Biased and Offensive Commentary

Description: Fable, a book-focused social app, used OpenAI’s API to generate AI-powered year-end reading summaries in December 2024. These summaries allegedly produced biased and offensive remarks about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Fable is reported to have apologized in a social media post on January 1, 2025.

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Alleged: Fable and OpenAI developed an AI system deployed by Fable, which harmed Fable and Fable users.
Alleged implicated AI system: OpenAI API used by Fable

Incident Stats

Incident ID
882
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2024-12-29
Editors
Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Incident OccurrenceFable’s Reader Summary Features Racism (And Probably AI)+2
A Book App Used AI to ‘Roast’ Its Users. It Went Anti-Woke Instead
Fable’s Reader Summary Features Racism (And Probably AI)

Fable’s Reader Summary Features Racism (And Probably AI)

smartbitchestrashybooks.com

A Book App Used AI to ‘Roast’ Its Users. It Went Anti-Woke Instead

A Book App Used AI to ‘Roast’ Its Users. It Went Anti-Woke Instead

wired.com

Fable embroiled in controversy over offensive AI reader summaries. What happened?

Fable embroiled in controversy over offensive AI reader summaries. What happened?

usatoday.com

Fable, a Book App, Makes Changes After Offensive A.I. Messages

Fable, a Book App, Makes Changes After Offensive A.I. Messages

nytimes.com

Fable’s Reader Summary Features Racism (And Probably AI)
smartbitchestrashybooks.com · 2025

Hey, Happy New Year, and have a seat. There may be more AI fuckery afoot! We’ve already been discussing the proliferation of AI narrators and AI authors. Why not start the year off with a fresh generative AI trashfire, this time with a side…

A Book App Used AI to ‘Roast’ Its Users. It Went Anti-Woke Instead
wired.com · 2025

Fable, a popular social media app that describes itself as a haven for “bookworms and bingewatchers,” created an AI-powered end-of-year summary feature recapping what books users read in 2024. It was meant to be playful and fun, but some of…

Fable embroiled in controversy over offensive AI reader summaries. What happened?
usatoday.com · 2025

Book tracking app Fable will remove its popular AI features after the platform generated some reader summaries that were offensive to race, gender, sexuality and disability.

Fable's annual reading summaries -- similar in style to Spotify Wr…

Fable, a Book App, Makes Changes After Offensive A.I. Messages
nytimes.com · 2025

Fable, a popular app for talking about and tracking books, is changing the way it creates personalized summaries for its users after complaints that an artificial intelligence model used offensive language.

One summary suggested that a read…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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