The Scourge Of AI-Generated Books

In June last year, I wrote Itchy Boots Has Accident In Africa and in 2022, I wrote How ItchyBoots Became A YouTube Sensation. During her recovery period in Holland, Noraly Schoenmaker wrote a book, Free Ride, due to be published in English on June 3rd, 2025. The new book gives an honest account of how she came to acquire her Royal Enfield Himalayan and decided to set off riding around India, Myanmar, and countries you and I will probably never visit. I already knew that she had published her new book in Dutch and was keenly following the release date of the English version. Anyway, I read about the release date this morning and headed over to Amazon to see for myself. Free Ride is indeed available on that platform from June 3 in both Kindle and hardback versions, but what sparked my curiosity was the number of other books related to Noraly Schoenmaker, purporting to be biographies of her or tales of her motorcycle adventures. They are clearly fakes.

AI-Generated Books Are Fake!

What struck me first were the images on the covers, purporting to be Noraly, and they look remarkably like her. But if anything, they are AI-generated images of dumb blondes looking glamorous, and that is not how she portrays herself on YouTube or anywhere else. In fact, as an experiment, I asked CoPilot to create an image of Noraly/ItchyBoots, and it looked nothing like her:

On the other hand, the images on the covers of these scam/fake books look scarily like the real woman:

I can only assume that the scammers, who, incidentally, are charging $14 for the hardback, must be using a more advanced AI engine than CoPilot.

Furthermore, some people have bought these AI-generated books and, having discovered that they were duped, confirmed what we all know in their reviews. They bought crap!

How Can Amazon Allow This To happen?

I have published books on KDP/Amazon, and, indeed, there don’t appear to be any authenticity checks as to the book content. I also publish books on numerous other platforms, including KDP/Amazon under a pen name, but one of my books was rejected because the girl on the cover was topless and emerging from a swimming pool, but not showing anything vital, shall we say. I only mention this because a semi-naked woman appears to be more offensive to Amazon than a fake book.

Is this plagiarism? Is it right to portray a real woman on the cover of a book with a fake, AI-generated biography? Clearly, Amazon has a challenge in its hands.

The above is a preface to one of the fake books and tries to entice the prospective reader that the book is genuine. What’s worrying about all this is that AI is blurring the lines between real and fake. Our children and grandchildren will come to accept that AI content is real, so perhaps we should entice them to read Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World to enable them to read between the real lines?

Where Is The Satisfaction In Publishing An AI-Generated Book?

Any author will tell you that writing is often easy, but sometimes very difficult if the words don’t materialise in your mind, so it can be a gruelling process. I was rejected dozens of times by publishers and agents, which is why I turned to self-publishing. But what I have written is my own work, and it often takes years of sweat to complete. But self-publishing is a two-edged sword, as we can see from the examples I’ve shown here. Furthermore, no authors are shown, only the publishers, who do not appear to exist anyway because the names are fake – the links show you that. Clearly, the objective is to make a fast buck from snake oil, nothing more.

Hoping that a human will read my input, I reported the ‘issue’ to Amazon, but I doubt that anything will be done.

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