Oh, a new book from your favorite author? No, it’s a fake written by an AI!

A few weeks ago, American author Jane Friedman had the unfortunate surprise of coming across several of her books for sale on Amazon. Problem, it is not she who wrote these books.

Books generated by artificial intelligence are already abounding on Amazon. However, it becomes much more problematic when it is claimed that the content was written by a known author.

Fakes present on Amazon and Goodreads

Jane Friedman has many books to her credit, in addition to being an eminent consultant in the field of writing and editing. Recently, one of her readers noticed questionable books signed with her name on Amazon and warned her about it. Having already experimented with ChatGPT-like models, Friedman immediately thought the books were AI-generated. The books had titles similar to the topics she usually writes about, but the text read as if someone had used a generative AI model to mimic her style.

” I’ve been blogging since 2009, much of my content is publicly available for training AI models “, she says on her website. The author quickly notified Amazon of the issue, but the e-commerce giant initially refused to remove the titles because she hadn’t trademarked her name. After Friedman posted a blog post and a thread on X.com (formerly Twitter) about it, the firm finally folded.

” We have clear content guidelines governing which books can be offered for sale, and we promptly investigate any book when an issue is raised. We welcome comments from authors and work directly with them to resolve any issues raised. We invest heavily to provide a trustworthy shopping experience, and to protect customers and authors from misuse of our services. commented an Amazon spokesperson. The fake books were also featured on Goodreads, the social network for avid readers acquired by Amazon in 2013.

More and more authors are rising up

Several authors claim to have had similar experiences. The language models are trained on large amounts of text from the Internet, including content written by professional authors.

” Generative AI is being used to replace writers, taking their work without permission, embedding those works into the fabric of those AI models, and then offering those AI models to the public, to other companies, to replace writers. So you can imagine the authors being a little upset about that. says Mary Rasenberger, director of the Authors Guild, an American authors’ defense group.

The organization is working with Amazon to spot AI-authored books on the marketplace. She also advocates for AI companies to allow authors to opt out of having their work used to train models. At the beginning of July, two famous American writers filed a complaint against OpenAI, because their works were exploited to form ChatGPT.

Sources: Jane Friedman, CNN