Author Says AI-Penned Books Are Being Fraudulently Sold Under Her Name

An author says fraudsters are using artificial intelligence to write books that mimic hers, and are selling them under her name on Amazon. 

Jane Friedman told CNN that the scam, which involved books that mimicked some of her titles and subject matter, was spotted by a fan who was searching for her work.

“When I started looking at these books, looking at the opening pages, looking at the bio, it was just obvious to me that it had been mostly, if not entirely, AI-generated… I have so much content available online for free, because I’ve been blogging forever, so it wouldn’t be hard to get an AI to mimic me” Friedman said.

In a blog post, Friedman said that the practice of misleading readers into buying “garbage books” offends her worse than having her actual work pirated. 

“Whoever’s doing this is obviously preying on writers who trust my name and think I’ve actually written these books. I have not,” she wrote. She added that she believes AI was used, since she's used the tools herself to test how they can reproduce her work. 

“It might be possible to ignore this nonsense on some level since these books aren’t receiving customer reviews (so far), and mostly they sink to the bottom of search results (although not always),” she wrote. “With the flood of AI content now published at Amazon, sometimes attributed to authors in a misleading or fraudulent manner, how can anyone reasonably expect working authors to spend every week for the rest of their lives policing this? And if authors don’t police it, they will certainly hear about it, from readers concerned about these garbage books, and from readers who credulously bought this crap and have complaints. Or authors might not hear any thing at all, and lose a potential reader forever.”

In an update, Friedman said the offending books had been scrubbed from her Goodreads and Amazon profiles. But she said that online retailers need to erect guardrails to protect both consumers and authors. 

“Amazon and Goodreads, I beg you to create a way to verify authorship, or for authors to easily block fraudulent books credited to them. Do it now, do it quickly.”

The rise of large language modeling programs like ChatGPT has led to numerous complaints from authors and other creators of intellectual property. In July, thousands of members of The Authors Guild signed onto a letter calling on tech leaders to pay up, saying their copyrighted work was integral to training such programs. Earlier that month, two authors filed a class action lawsuit against ChatGPT parent company OpenAI, making similar claims.

Others have warned that AI is wreaking havoc on the book market, with floods of AI-penned gibberish taking over Amazon’s bestseller lists.