This piece is a little long, but entertaining. The subject of the biography had never had any contact with the author, but apparently totally AI-generated books are flooding Amazon.
~ JBB
This piece is a little long, but entertaining. The subject of the biography had never had any contact with the author, but apparently totally AI-generated books are flooding Amazon.
~ JBB
I found the article to be very, very short. There's nothing there except the title and the picture. Because I didn't feel like giving yet another AI my shoe size to be allowed to read the article.
Here's a two-paragraph synopsis, generated by Dia AI…
Kashmir Hill, a New York Times technology reporter, discovers that an unauthorized biography of her — clearly generated with A.I. — has been quietly for sale on Amazon for nearly a year. The 90-page book, grandly titled "The Biography of Kashmir Hill," stitches together public facts, generic life-coach-style observations and outright fabrications, all rendered in overwrought prose and "absolutely packed with em dashes." Hill's experience becomes an entry point into a wider phenomenon: a flood of low-quality, A.I.-written nonfiction on Amazon, often produced by anonymous or pseudonymous "authors" chasing passive income. Some of these books, like a biography of Charlie Kirk, even become best sellers before being removed after a barrage of scathing reviews. Amazon allows A.I.-generated books as long as they meet its guidelines, and researchers have documented an explosion in e-book output since the release of ChatGPT, especially in nonfiction.
In trying to find out who wrote her book, Hill instead tracks down Bill Johns, a retired cybersecurity consultant turned hyper-prolific A.I. bookmaker with 445 titles on Amazon about everything from sports to famous bridges. Johns walks her through his assembly-line process: collecting links, prompting ChatGPT for frames, outlines and chapters, lightly editing, and publishing via Amazon's tools, with the goal of churning out up to 10 books a week. He sells a few hundred books a month — "bar money" — despite readers panning many of them as boring, repetitive and error-ridden. Around this, Hill situates a broader debate: the Authors Guild is pressing Amazon to label A.I. books, economists see market growth regardless of quality, and some academics argue that "A.I. slop" might be a new form of kitsch that democratizes low-effort creativity. Yet in Hill's case, the result feels more like exploitation than art: a hollow, error-filled simulacrum of a life story that vanishes from Amazon as soon as she publicly calls the author out.
I see no option other than for Zon to deal with AI generated content in some way or other. There has always been a passive income slop problem with KU and the relative ease of publishing there, but now it is completely and utterly out of control. Anything legit - even if terrible but "human crafted" - is just buried in a unstoppable tide of AI titles.