Google and Amazon AI Say Hitler’s Mein Kampf Is ‘a True Work of Art’
Google’s featured snippet is pulling in an Amazon AI summary of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf that calls it “a true work of art” in the latest AI-related fuckup affecting top search results.
As of writing, searching for “mein kampf positive reviews” returned a result that was pulled from an AI-generated summary of an Amazon listing’s customer reviews. So, it’s a search algorithm attempting to summarize an AI summary. The full AI summary on Amazon says: “Customers find the book easy to read and interesting. They appreciate the insightful and intelligent rants. The print looks nice and is plain. Readers describe the book as a true work of art. However, some find the content boring and grim. Opinions vary on the suspenseful content, historical accuracy, and value for money.”
As I’m writing this, Google says “An AI Overview is not available for this search,” but the Amazon AI summary was in large text directly below it, in the space where an overview would typically be, above other web results. This is what Google calls a featured snippet: “Google’s automated systems select featured snippets based on how well they answer the specific search request and how helpful they are to the user,” the company says. A highlight appeared, added by Google, over the phrase “easy to read and interesting.” Notably the featured snippet result for this doesn’t quote everything from Amazon’s AI, so it is itself a summary.
Google’s result for “mein kampf positive reviews” as of early Thursday morning, showing the Amazon review as a “featured snippet.”
Screenshot of Amazon’s AI-generated review summary
Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the security, trust, and safety initiative at Cornell Tech and formerly principal of Trust & Safety Intelligence at Google, first spotted the result.
After I contacted Google for comment (the company hasn’t responded as of writing) an AI Overview did appear, and notes that the book is “widely condemned for its hateful and racist ideology,” but that historical analyses “might point to aspects of the book that could be considered ‘positive’ from a purely literary or rhetorical perspective.”
Screenshot of Google’s search result for “mein kampf positive reviews” as of late Thursday morning, showing the AI Overview result.
This is, at least, a better summation of the conversation around Hitler’s book that Amazon’s AI summary gives. The AI-generated review summary on the Amazon listing also shows links to see reviews that mention specific words, like “readability,” “read pace,” and “suspenseful content.” Enough people mentioned Mein Kampf being boring that there’s a “boredom” link, too.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The 2,067 reviews for this specific copy of Hitler’s fascist manifesto are mostly positive, and taken extremely literally, the blueprint for Nazism is easy to read and, in some sense, “interesting.” But the reviews are much more nuanced than that. Reviewing the roadmap for the Holocaust from the world’s most infamous genocidal dictator with “five stars” seems twisted, but the reviews are nuanced in a way that AI clearly doesn’t understand—but a human can.
“Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, should be read by everyone in the world who are interested in a world of peace, social responsibility, and worldwide cooperation,” one reviewer wrote, in an honestly pretty concerning start to a very long review. But they go on to write more that clarifies their point of view: “This evil book presents a dark vision of how to go about creating tyranny in a democratic society so that one, similar to Russia, is created. […] Also, Hitler is an excellent writer; he is not a rambling madman writing disconnected ideas and expressing a confusing methodology. His text is easy reading, and it is a world classic that is a must read.”
Another five-star review says: “Chilling to begin reading this book and realize that these are the words written by Adolf Hitler. Read it and absorb what he says in his own words and you soon grasp what he means. […] We are bound to repeat History if we don’t understand mistakes that were made in the past.”
These aren’t “positive” reviews; most of the five-star reviews are noting the quality of the print or shipping, and not endorsing the contents of the book.
Mein Kampf has never been banned in the U.S. (unlike plenty of other books about race, gender, and sex), but Amazon did briefly ban listings of the book from its platform in 2020 before reinstating it.
Google’s AI Overview shoots itself in the algorithmic foot frequently, so it’s noteworthy that it’s sitting this result out. When it launched in May 2024 as a default feature on searches, it was an immediate and often hysterical mess, telling people it’s chill to eat glue and that they should consume one small rock a day. In January, the feature was telling users to use the most famous sex toy in the world with children for behavioral issues. These weird results are beside the bigger point: Google’s perversion of its own search function—its most popular and important product—is a deep problem that it still hasn’t fixed, and that has real repercussions for the health of the internet. At first, AI Overview was so bad Google added an option to turn it off entirely, but the company is still hanging on to the feature despite all of this.
The Mein Kampf AI summaries are also an example of how AI is starting to eat itself online, and the cracks are showing. Studies in the last few years show that AI models are consuming AI-generated content as training data in a way that’s polluting and destroying the models themselves.
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