Tech 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.
