Amazon may not remove AI-written books falsely attributed to an author

Here is a curious case of AI spoiling someone else’s party. If stealing others’ jobs wasn’t enough, here is an instance of AI now stealing someone else’s identity. As journalist, author, and professor Jane Friedman found out much to her horror, several books written by AI are now selling on Amazon all of which are purportedly written by her, except that it isn’t. To make matters worse, such books are based on the same genre in which she specializes, that of helping other authors get their works published.

The best that Friedman or anyone else can do in such a scenario is to bring it to Amazon’s notice. However,  she wasn’t perhaps prepared to accept Amazon’s response on this as it shot down Friedman’s request to remove such titles that are falsely attributed to her citing the author does not have a trademark on her name, Yahoo reported.

“As of today, there are about half a dozen books being sold on Amazon, with my name on them, that I did not write or publish,” Friedman said. “Some huckster generated them using AI.”

This comes on the back of earlier instances where books written with the help of AI tools have been found to be spamming the Amazon bestseller lists. While that was something that Amazon, to a large extent needed to be worried about, here the author’s prospects are at stake.

With titles like The Business of Being a Writer, What Editors Do, and Publishing 101 to her credit, Friedman found that other AI-written books are based on similar topics. A few such titles include Your Guide to Writing a Bestseller eBook on Amazon, Publishing Power: Navigating Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, and Promote to Prosper: Strategies to Skyrocket Your eBook Sales on Amazon. It’s like another author but with the same name – Jane Friedman – writing the latter set of books.

What proved to be equally worrying for Friedman is that the AI-written books have been found to be listed on her Goodreads profile. This will further add credibility to such titles and makes them seem to have been written by the original Friedman.

“A reasonable person might think I control what books are shown on my Goodreads profile, or that I approve them, or at the very least I could have them easily removed,” Friedman wrote on her website. “Not so.”

Fortunately for Friedman, the Author’s Guild offered help and promised to take things up with Amazon. Friedman herself happens to be a member of the Author’s Guild.

Things also seemed to work for Friedman in the end as such dubious titles ultimately came to be listed as ‘temporarily out of stock.’ Even better, none of Friedman’s real titles are found to be linked to her author page as well. While all of this can be considered a welcome development, perhaps the best possible scenario would be for Amazon to devise a policy for identifying and eradicating such titles right at the onset to dissuade frivolous writers from making such attempts in the future.