Amazon.com has begun requiring authors who want to sell books through its e-book program to tell the company in advance whether their work contains material generated by artificial intelligence.
Matt Slocum/AP
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Matt Slocum/AP
Amazon.com has begun requiring authors who want to sell their books through its e-book program to tell the company in advance whether their work contains material generated by artificial intelligence.
Matt Slocum/AP
When Kara Swisher, a highly influential technology journalist, publishes a new book, burn the book, there were reports that her biography, supposedly generated by artificial intelligence, suddenly appeared on Amazon. Mr. Swisher immediately responded: New York Times’ hard fork Podcast “Sent [Amazon CEO] Andy Jassy wrote a memo and said, “Oh my god?” It costs money,” Swisher said.
However, although Mr. Swisher was able to have the book in question removed from Amazon, the issue of fraudulent AI-generated books is a widespread concern for authors, most of whom have not had any email correspondence with Amazon’s CEO. I haven’t.
“Scam books on Amazon have been an issue for years,” said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, an advocacy group for authors. But she says the problem has increased in recent months. She says, “Every new book seems to have some kind of sister book, a book that is trying to steal sales.”
Marie Arana is a writer who spent years researching and writing her book. LatinoLand: A portrait of America’s largest and least understood minority. The book was published in February. The day after its release, she checked out reviews on Amazon. “Right below the cover of my book was another cover,” Alana says. “The cover said, “America’s largest and least understood ethnic minority: an overview of Latinoland.”
Alana sent NPR a photo of the Amazon search results. This book says it was written by Clara Bailey. A review of Bailey’s work revealed that he had published many of these so-called summary books and had them for sale on Amazon. NPR reached out to an Amazon spokesperson about Bailey but did not receive a relevant response. And when the company asked about AI-generated books in general, she didn’t give anyone an interview. Since the NPR investigation, Bailey’s book has been removed from Amazon. Her publication history of Bailey’s is still listed on her Goodreads.
Jane Friedman, author and publishing industry analyst, said that AI-generated biographies, summaries, and even copycat books tend to provide lower-quality writing, which can lead to them being flagged as AI-generated. It is said that it is easy to get caught. She says that writing has a general quality. “It feels like it wasn’t written by a human,” she says. “Humans – interestingly enough – will do a better job of being bad.”
Amazon spokesperson Lindsey Hamilton released a statement outlining recent steps the company has taken in the AI space. Last year, the company introduced a policy requiring all publishers using Kindle Direct Publishing to provide information about whether their content is AI-generated. Additionally, there is a limit to the number of titles that can be published in a day.
“We actively prevent books from being published and remove books that do not follow our guidelines, including content that creates a poor customer experience,” the statement said. “If a pattern of abuse is warranted, we also suspend the publisher’s account to prevent repeat abuse.”
Razenberger says the publishers that list these books benefit from increasingly sophisticated AI tools that can quickly generate low-quality “scam” books. “By the time Amazon finds out about them, they’ve already made some profit and move on to other things,” she says.
But the problems with AI-generated books can hurt authors more than just their sales numbers.
“That’s reputational damage,” Friedman said.
Last year, she wrote a blog post outlining her experience with books in publishing, which she purported to have written, but which she did not. “Even the most novice reader will read this and say, ‘This person is not going to give me any useful information,'” she says. Friedman makes most of her income from paid newsletters and classes she offers, and her books can be seen by potential customers, she said. “Then they go find other, better resources.”
And while it’s currently possible to flag AI-generated sentences, Rasenberger and other authors see a future where it won’t be so easy.
