Author alarmed to find name on fraudulent AI-generated books sold online

Writer Jane Friedman is urging authors to police their name and how it's being used online after she discovered several books written by artificial intelligence being sold under her name.

"Certainly bad actors can steal my name and apply it to anything they want much more easily than they've ever been able to before," Friedman told Fox News' Bill Hemmer on Monday. 

"So this was an instance of someone using Amazon's self-publishing platform to upload AI-generated books and then put my name on them. It doesn't really matter what their real name is. They're allowed to put whatever they want."

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Whoever is behind the ploy also pulls in all money earned from the AI-developed titles.

Goodreads, one of the platforms allegedly subject to the problem, said, "We have clear guidelines on which books are included on Goodreads, and we'll click quickly rather investigate when a concern is raised, removing books when we need to. We continue to invest in improvements to quickly detect and take action on books that violate our guidelines."

Friedman doesn't believe there are any systems in place to stop the issue in its tracks, however, and said she knows of several other authors who have experienced the same thing for months.

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"There's just been an avalanche of AI-generated content going up on Amazon and Goodreads alike, whether they're credited to real authors or not. But there is a ton of this out there and their systems just haven't kept up," she said.

Hemmer read the following statement from Amazon: "We invest heavily to provide a trustworthy shopping experience and protect customers and authors from misuse of our service," but Friedman said emailing Amazon about the issue has yielded no results.

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"I attempted to contact them through their standard infringement form. And with that, because this is AI-generated work, I wasn't able to show that I had copyright protection over this, and I wasn't able to show that I own a trademark, but most authors aren't trademarking their name, so I was quickly turned down as far as my request to remove this material."

Friedman, who has been in the publishing business for 25 years, said her advice for writers suffering through a similar situation is to join writers' organizations and contact your publisher since both have "back channels" and are more likely to reach an actual human representing Amazon.

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