GoKawiilNo living American historian is as prolific as Blake Whiting. In one week alone last fall, he published 13 books on a host of complex archaeological and historical subjects, ranging from the collapse of Near Eastern civilizations in 1177 BCE to the recent discovery of a huge Silk Road–era city in Central Asia.
Amazon sells his hardbacks for $28.99, the paperbacks for $20.99, and the Kindle versions for a bargain $7.99. What you can’t buy from Amazon at any price, however, is Blake Whiting’s CV. Though the books claim to be copyrighted in his name, you won’t find an author picture or bio, nor will you find his website or Instagram. He does not belong to the faculty of any college or university, and he is unknown to those academics he cites in his books—which are not actually copyrighted.
Whiting, as you have guessed, is neither historian nor human. His fake persona is harbinger of an alarming trend threatening disaster to academics and journalists alike.
I know this all too well; I am a science and history author who has published extensively on many of the subjects covered in Whiting’s books. I have written magazine features that have been clearly reshuffled, reorganized, and supplemented with other freely available material to masquerade as the unique work of “Blake Whiting.” This is not plagiarism in the old-fashioned sense, in which a few sentences or paragraphs are lifted from a previously published work. This is word-laundering on a truly industrial scale, aided and abetted by one of the world’s largest corporations. Using AI tools and a pseudonym, unknown culprits are now profiting from my work and that of my colleagues. Worse, they are limiting what we can write about in the future. What publisher wants to publish a second book on an archaeological discovery, no matter how significant?
The volumes by “Blake Whiting” provide sophisticated analyses with up-to-date information, flashy covers, and introductions written in the first person. There is no hint that the author is not human. “I first encountered news of this discovery”—a large settlement recently found in Uzbekistan— “while researching trade networks for an entirely different project,” states the introduction to Archaeology of the Silk Road’s Forgotten Metropolises, “and like many historians, my initial reaction was skepticism.”
That book details the groundbreaking work of Michael Frachetti of Washington University in St. Louis and his colleague, Farhod Maksudov, of Uzbekistan’s Institute of Archaeology in Tashkent. The two men have spent more than a decade excavating remote Central Asian sites that shed fresh light on the medieval network of the Silk Road, and they have published their results in peer-reviewed journals. I have covered their research in Science and Smithsonian, visiting their excavations and interviewing them extensively. When I contacted Frachetti, he was not familiar with “Blake Whiting.” “Never met him,” he said. “I guess someone is making money off us.”
Likewise, Eric Cline, a George Washington University archaeologist and author of the popular 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which was published by Princeton University Press, is unfamiliar with the alleged author behind 1177 BC Revisited, published in November 2025. “Not a single footnote,” Cline notes of the new book. “No bibliography whatsoever. The ‘author’ does mention me in passing in the introduction, but nothing more than that.” Cline calls the work “a complete rip off” that is not plagiarism in the form of cut-and-paste, but a clever reshaping of his own material.
Readers, however, seem unaware that “Blake Whiting” is not a flesh-and-blood author. “Fascinating read!” wrote one Amazon reviewer of a book about the important Turkish archaeological site called Gobekli Tepe. “Well organized chapters, clearly explaining what has been discovered,” wrote another. “Speculations on all aspects are well grounded in real archaeology.” A reviewer on Goodreads gushed: “This was an EXCELLENT overview for the layperson about this site. It was a simple but well-balanced discussion of the site and its possible origins.”
AI projects designed to pose as real researchers, set in motion by unethical humans, with the cooperation of a powerful corporation, are now capable of fooling even careful bibliophiles. This is not the ChatGPT of 2022. “It reads beautifully and is accurate,” Cline says ruefully of 1177 BC Revisited.
The books are not listed in the U.S. Public Records System; works created entirely with AI cannot be copyrighted, since their authors are not human. Each of these books, however, has an Amazon Standard Identification Number. One 206-page volume about a recent high-tech effort to read ancient Roman scrolls that burned two millennia ago is even entitled, apparently without irony, AI Reads the Dead.
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