How AI-generated books are impersonating real authors

When shopping for your next read online be careful when you judge that book by its cover the virtual shelves flooded with books that appear to be linked to popular bestsellers with similar sounding titles and covers the actual book Savannah saw it firsthand after the publication of her book mostly what God does posting some of the copycats on Instagram like this workbook by Savannah gather artificial intelligence is making the problem worse as AI generated content can be churned out within minut

es and authors are sounding the alarm about 10 days later we started to see these workbooks pop up on Amazon days after publishing her book in September Lisa Sun noticed workbooks appearing right below it on the site not written or authorized by Lisa or her publisher she says some were even recommended by Amazon I had a good friend text me saying I'm so excited to read your book and I bought the workbook I said cancel the workbook order it's not mine I don't know where it came from Jane fredman

is the author of three books but in August she suddenly found six more on Amazon bearing her name that she'd never seen before as soon as I saw these books available for sale I knew they were likely AI generated it really coincided with the explosion of AI writing tools and it was exactly the kind of generic vague not very good writing that I would expect how does that make you feel as an actual author who puts and love and care into your craft well there's a bit of panic in that this is my repu

tation on the line the nonprofit author Guild says the problem is worsening as the technology improves we've been seeing these kind of scams and fake books on Amazon for many years but as we predicted AI has just made it so much easier and faster to produce them and they are crowding out the actual real book before it even comes out both Lisa and Jane complained to Amazon and they eventually took down those fakes but the problem persists it's like wacka I went on and spent an hour reported a num

ber of them they were taken down and then just a few weeks later more popped up Amazon saying in a statement to NBC news we both prevent books from being listed as well as remove books that do not adhere to our guidelines including content that creates a poor customer experience and Goodreads telling us in part we both work to prevent the addition of books that violate our guidelines as well as quickly investigate when a concern is raised removing books when we need to authors asking online reta

ilers to be more proactive if it's purely AI generated I think it should be labeled as uh AI author but until standards get stricter reader beware always check out the ratings and reviews look carefully at the author's name and title and if you fall for a fake don't hesitate to return and report it all really important important actions the author's Guild is actually suing open Ai and Microsoft saying they should license book content and pay authors for their original intellectual property we re

ached out to both companies we have not yet heard back but the thing is a lot of this is happening overseas the author's Guild has done investigations into the source of these books and it's very difficult to follow up and in some cases it's perfectly legal well there's a biography online that is your bi your biography which is also a fake I I can't I bought it so say Well it has someone on the cover but it's not me it's not you and so I can't believe there's not a I I can't believe there's not

a way that they can figure out an algorithm to kind of put a stop to this I think that's what everyone is asking for at least a little more transparency from the online sellers label this as AI generated content at least then the buyer the consumer red flag if it's spelled g a t i e then it should be moved within the algorithm to the recommended section well that's the thing the publisher says there's not that much they can really do about it unless it's like a really cop like the color of the b

ook or something like this and it's so many authors I've heard from it's my parents like they would that generation who supports you for they're getting like $8.99 9.99 to death and it's a scam and it sucks for the older people who are losing money especially in the non-fiction category you see those workbooks immediately what really is terrible is when it pops up before the legitimate book comes out that's taking what would have been author money away from that person because someone buys this

book thinking it's your book and it's not it's unethical and it's a scam yeah it's a SC I bought book on tape and it was Craig's voice it was just a it was just a late night that have been really late now thank you hey thanks for watching don't miss the Today's Show every weekday at 11:00 a.m. eastern 8 Pacific on our streaming Channel today all day to watch head to today.com allay or click the link right here