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<\/p>\nA few months back, I was doomscrolling before bed when I received a WhatsApp message from a friend with a link to Amazon.<\/p>\n
As someone who has spent years reporting on technology, and now solely on artificial intelligence, it’s pretty common to get tips about something weird that was generated with AI.<\/p>\n
Unusually, this tip was about me. Sort of.<\/p>\n
The listing was for a book entitled Conspiracy Nation Exercises: Redefine Living Through Cam Wilson Teachings.<\/p>\n
I couldn’t know for sure it was something, and not someone, who’d decided to write a book about me, but there were signs.<\/p>\n
The title closely resembled a book of mine that I co-wrote and published last year.<\/p>\n
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The AI-generated book (left) had a similar title to the original book (right). (ABC News: Scott Preston)<\/p>\n
The “author”, Leni McAllister, doesn’t seem to exist, and the short blurb has the tell-tale signs of AI-generated writing.<\/p>\n
Identifying “slop” becomes a sixth sense after you’ve seen enough of it.<\/p>\n
Em dashes. The distinctive tempo. The blurb even had the “it’s not X \u2014 it’s Y” that AI seems to love.<\/p>\n
So, I bought the book.<\/p>\n
Two days later, it arrived in the mail. I didn’t expect it to be so absurdly big. Like A4-sized-big.<\/p>\n
I was able to quickly flick through its meagre 89 pages, although even that number gives a misleading impression about its seriousness. The text was double-spaced and printed in a very large size.<\/p>\n
The moment my bemusement turned to hurt was when I realised that they had chosen Comic Sans \u2014 the most unserious of all fonts, and one more closely associated with primary school projects \u2014 as a suitable match for my “teachings”.<\/p>\n
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The AI-generated book was printed double-spaced on huge pages and in the Comic Sans font. (ABC News: Scott Preston)<\/p>\n
‘They pop up everywhere’<\/p>\n
I’m not a full-time author but, by all accounts, making a living publishing in Australia is extremely gruelling.<\/p>\n
I was holding something that probably took longer to leaf through than it did to generate; filled with things I didn’t say, poorly written and bizarrely laid out, it was extremely frustrating.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It felt like the exact opposite of the care and love we poured into our book.<\/p>\n
It also felt like a physical slop that existed not to be enjoyed or understood, but to deceive a prospective reader just long enough to convince them to click “buy” online.<\/p>\n
Etsy is now overrun with AI and copied works<\/a><\/p>\n Global online marketplace Etsy is known as a home for the handmade, but users are reporting an influx of AI-generated products and, in some cases, copied artistic works.<\/p>\n I then discovered an infestation of other books online using an identical template, just for different authors and books.<\/p>\n One author who’d put out her debut book around the same time as me, Natalie Kyriacou, responded with exasperation when I sent her a link to Nature’s Last Dance Exercises: Redefine Living through Natalie Kyriacou Teachings.<\/p>\n It turns out she already knew about this because she’d heard from those who mistakenly bought the fraudulent version of her book off Amazon.<\/p>\n “We have been trying to remove them but they pop up everywhere,” she says.<\/p>\n Amazon admitted the listing for the AI book broke its guidelines. (Reuters: Pascal Rossignol)<\/p>\n So I sent Amazon a list of questions. The next day, the listing for “my” book was taken down.<\/p>\n The listing had broken Amazon’s guidelines, I was told, although the exact rule that was broken wasn’t clear. The company took others down, too.<\/p>\n “We have proactive and reactive methods that help us detect content that violates our guidelines, whether AI generated or not. We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed, and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an email.<\/p>\n But when I asked for any information about who was behind it, the company didn’t provide it.<\/p>\n “Looking into this for you,” one staff member said.<\/p>\n I didn’t hear back.<\/p>\n ‘Platforms should bear responsibility’<\/p>\n But I was lucky.<\/p>\n Others have struggled to get AI books taken down, sometimes books that aren’t just about them, but are attributed to them.<\/p>\n Australian Society of Authors chief executive Lucy Hayward says this has become so common as to be unremarkable.<\/p>\n “On the publication day for an author, you’ll often see that there’s already an AI-generated version of the book that’s already been on sale,” she says.<\/p>\n Hayward says there are obvious ways it hurts authors: they lose sales to the fakes, they get poor reviews because someone bought the slop and blamed them, it confuses people trying to buy the book, and they give up.<\/p>\n She says jobs many authors have done as side hustles, like copywriting, have been particularly impacted by the spread of generative AI, and fraud is contributing to dropping reading rates.<\/p>\n Hayward says there are some simple fixes, like requiring platforms like Amazon to effectively police these kinds of derivative works and requiring retailers to label AI-generated content so readers don’t get tricked.<\/p>\n “Platforms should bear responsibility,” she says.<\/p>\n But her remedies go further.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hayward says AI companies need to do licensing deals with authors to compensate for the books they’ve taken and to do more to protect their intellectual property.<\/p>\n Leaked AI copyright proposal triggers political firestorm<\/a><\/p>\n The leaked plans have sparked backlash from creatives and critics across the political spectrum.<\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/01ff800a830d8a633fb2a75838948f60.jpeg\")
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