Author Rory Cellan-Jones stumbled upon a book on Amazon that looks just like his own memoir while browsing the website for his own book. But when he looked closely, he realized that this biography was not written by a person but by AI software.
Discovering AI-Generated Book on Amazon
Cellan-Jones found this puzzling, given the challenges of selling books about his own life and the unexpected appearance of books about him by others.
His book titled "Ruskin Park: Sylvia, Me and the BBC," serves as an autobiography, chronicling his solitary upbringing and the complex dynamics of his relationship with his mother.
The author was astonished at the AI-generated book, deeming it a wholly fabricated narrative. He pointed out that it contained passages depicting the Cellan-Jones family as academics gathered around a table with a kind father and a mother who is a teacher.
He described this portrayal as entirely fictitious. According to Interesting Engineering, the situation took a troubling turn when Amazon sent him an email recommending that he purchase the book - not his own creation, but the counterfeit one.
Cellan-Jones found this turn of events particularly frustrating, as Amazon's algorithm seemed to prioritize promoting the fake book over his own painstakingly crafted work. He noted that this effectively allowed book spam and recommended it to the very person who found it most irritating.
Amazon's Response
Amazon has taken action by removing the book authored by someone using the pseudonym "Steven Walryn." Intriguingly, this mysterious author had a prolific track record, having published more than 30 books, with 15 released in a single month.
The individual is suspected to have leveraged Amazon's self-publishing platform, the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) system. Amazon subsequently removed all of Walryn's publications.
The AI software employed by Walryn in making the counterfeit book was probably trained using Cellan-Jones' authentic work. The Guardian reported a similar instance in August involving Jane Friedman, who had to intervene with Amazon to have five books falsely attributed to her removed.
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Other Instances
These books also exhibited signs of being generated by AI. In recent months, several accounts of well-known authors have utilized generative AI tools such as ChatGPT. These tools can be trained on extensive datasets, including books, which enables them to generate text that has been rephrased or modified.
On September 22, Vulture reported a group of 17 prominent authors initiated legal action against OpenAI, alleging that the company employed their literary works to train its ChatGPT chatbot.
These authors contended that ChatGPT had replicated their content without obtaining permission or showing any consideration. This copyrighted material was then incorporated into OpenAI's extensive language model, GPT.
In a separate case that transpired in July, comedian Sarah Silverman and fellow writers Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Meta, accusing them of copyright infringement related to the training of their large language models, ChatGPT and LLaMA, respectively.
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