• 2 min read
Fake Books Flood Apple Books in Hours
Apple Books and Amazon are grappling with a surge of AI-written knockoffs, including fake versions of bestselling titles and biographies made in hours.
Image: 9to5Mac
Fake books are becoming a bigger problem on Apple Books and Amazon, with some apparently produced in just a few hours. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last month, tech columnist Joanna Stern said she found 10 fake versions of her book I Am Not a Robot on Apple Books within days of the real title being published.
According to Stern, most of the copies were AI-generated summaries using fake authors and publishers, along with covers that mimicked the look of the original. She said most were priced at $9.99, while some reached $20.99. After buying several, she found they closely followed her book’s structure and seemed designed to mislead readers into thinking they were the original, or at least an official summary.
“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.”
Stern said Apple removed the fakes she reported, but three more quickly appeared. She also pointed to similar copycats targeting Lena Dunham’s Famesick and Haley Sacks’s Future Rich Person, including covers with AI-generated women resembling the real author.
New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill found a fake biography of herself on Amazon and discovered it was part of a much larger market of AI-written biographies. She said the book about her was full of inaccuracies, and that both the listed author and profile photo were fake. The supposed author, John Crane Miller, was described as a “seasoned biographer and cultural analyst,” but used a widely circulated stock image. Hill found that 10 biographies had been published under that name in a single week.
When Hill tracked down one creator of these AI biographies, he said he could have used ChatGPT to make hers in just a few hours. The issue also extends beyond ebooks, since Amazon’s print-on-demand service lets sellers offer paperback editions at zero cost upfront.
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Between Apple Books and Amazon, there appear to be tens of thousands of these fake books online. For readers, the safest move for now is to scrutinize reviews and sample pages before buying.
Computing Editor
Tomas lives in the terminal. He covers chips, laptops, and operating systems with a focus on performance and efficiency. He reads kernel changelogs the way other people read fiction, and he's always on the hunt for the perfect mechanical keyboard switch. If it processes data, Tomas has an opinion on it.
via 9to5Mac
