The Madras High Court on Nov. 10 ordered an investigation into the book purchases of a newly opened public library in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which cost ₹3 billion (about HK$250 million) to build and is accused of acquiring more than a thousand books suspected of being generated by artificial intelligence.
The Periyar Arivulagam library in Coimbatore opened on Oct. 16. The Indian novelist Perumal Murugan, who visited last month, said he was concerned that the library was filled with "books containing false information and of doubtful authorship". Writing in an online magazine, he said nearly 1,800 books in the library's Tamil-language section had been supplied by a little-known publisher called Agal Vilakku Pathippagam. Many of them carried the names of unfamiliar authors, were priced unusually high, and had problems with their International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs). According to reports, the publisher's registered address bears no signage indicating that the business actually exists.
One of the titles, Naladiyar: A Guide to Life, runs to 300 pages and is priced at ₹1,445 (about HK$120), four times what comparable books cost. It describes the Naladiyar as a Tamil poet and philosopher, when the work is in fact a classical Tamil ethical anthology of 400 quatrains. Another book credits the wrong author for Madurai Kanchi, a classical Tamil poem.
The High Court has directed the state's anti-corruption agency, the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC), to investigate the purchases, and has frozen the bank accounts of the publisher involved. The state government has ordered an internal audit of the library's holdings.
Rajmohan, the state's school education minister, said the case could be "India's first AI scam" and that the investigation would be extended to other public libraries across the state.
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