GoKawiilTech writer Joanna Stern wrote last month about discovering 10 fake versions of her book I Am Not a Robot on Apple Books within days of the real thing being published. While she was able to get these removed, new ones quickly appeared.
New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill found a fake biography of herself on Amazon, and discovered this was one of thousands of AI-written biographies available on sale …
Stern discovered that most of the copies were AI-slop summaries of her book, with fake authors and publishers.
In total, I found ten AI-generated ebooks clearly riding on mine, with AI-generated covers mimicking the style of my real one—the same blue, yellow and red color palette. Most were priced at $9.99, but some have gone as high as $20.99. So I bought a few to see just how close they came to the original. Sophie Mercer’s version was essentially an AI-generated summary, with chapters and a structure that closely mirrored mine. This and the other counterfeits I looked through all seemed intended to fool readers into thinking this was the original—or at least a summary of it.
She says she managed to get Apple to remove them, but three more fakes quickly appeared.
I’m not alone. Lena Dunham’s Famesick has multiple lookalikes on the platform. Haley Sacks’s Future Rich Person has copycats that even use AI generated images of women on the cover that resemble the real author. These aren’t obscure titles. They’re bestsellers. If Apple can’t keep AI knockoffs of its highest-profile books out of its store, how can independent authors or small publishers feel confident theirs will be protected?
Hill found her own biography was wildly inaccurate, and both the author and its photo were fake.
I clicked on the author, one John Crane Miller. His bio page described him as a “seasoned biographer and cultural analyst,” and his portrait was a widely used stock photo of a white man in a suit speaking at a conference. [Mine] was one of 10 biographies that Mr. Miller had published in a single week.
Between Apple Books and Amazon, there appear to be tens of thousands of fake AI slop books online. When Hill tracked down one of the creators of AI biographies, he said he could have used ChatGPT to create hers in just a few hours.
The issue isn’t limited to e-books: Amazon offers authors a print-on-demand service, which means there is zero cost to offer a paperback edition.
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