Potentially AI-generated books that have found a market on Amazon.Supplied
“Check out the cover,” the author Mark Bourrie wrote on the social-media app BlueSky last week, with a link to an Amazon listing for a book titled Mark Carney: A Biography Book Exploring His Rise, His Values, and His Vision as Canada’s Prime Minister.
Beyond the garbled subtitle, the cover featured an upside-down elongated Canadian flag and the edge of a portrait of a man wearing glasses who bore little resemblance to Carney. It was one of at least a half-dozen Canadian political biographies one could find on Amazon that day that appeared slapped together, at best. Like many others, it also contained the hallmarks of generative artificial intelligence: untraceable author, breezy page count, text of questionable sourcing and grammar.
“People were buying these books expecting to get researched books, and they didn’t,” says Bourrie, the author of Ripper, a genuine biography of Pierre Poilievre. “It’s bad enough for Canadian researched non-fiction as it is. If this is the beginning of something, it’s the beginning of something really bad. The potential for disinformation is off the charts.”
Books about Canadian political leaders are the latest in the growing pile of what appear to be fakes that are hastily cobbled together, possibly using generative AI, many of which are independently published through Amazon. These kinds of books flooded search results during this spring’s federal election campaign, but more still have popped up in the past two weeks, with at least one already referencing the voting results. Some have been printed on demand at an Amazon facility in Ontario.
These books can dilute the search results for authentic titles, devaluing the heavy work authors and publishers put into making them. At least one book that appeared about Poilievre last week was ostensibly authored by a cat.
“It’s an assault, it’s a fraud, it’s a scam, and if it competes with a real book, it could displace sales,” says Laura Rock Gaughan, executive director of the Literary Press Group of Canada, the 50-year-old advocacy group for literary publishers.
Amazon requires uploaders to declare if content submitted through its Kindle Direct Publishing platform has been generated by AI, though examples routinely emerge that fall through the cracks. Spokesperson Tim Gillman said in an e-mail that the company has “pro-active and reactive methods” to detect books uploaded by users that violate its guidelines, including around AI.
“We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed, and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines,” Gillman wrote. “We continue to enhance our protections against non-compliant content, and our process and guidelines will keep evolving as we see changes in publishing.”
Hastily assembled books have plagued the publishing world since marketplaces such as Amazon began allowing authors to sell independently published books easily and widely. With generative AI, it became common for “summaries” of existing books, and fake AI-generated books with well-known authors’ names on them, to show up in search results.
These days, opportunists are focusing on headline-generating subjects such as political leaders. “The nature of it has changed,” says Jane Friedman, who’s written numerous books on the publishing industry, and raised alarms across that sector in 2023 after drawing attention to fake books published under her name.
These days, she says, “You’ll see a lot of AI-generated books trying to coast on new titles, probably scraping metadata from Amazon.”
While self-publishing programs have opened up many opportunities for new authors to break out without traditional gatekeepers, bad actors have also come to take advantage of these systems.
Many of the apparently fake biographies have obvious clues suggesting hastily published origins, and The Globe and Mail reviewed several that were still listed last week.
The first sentence of the since-delisted Carney biography that Bourrie found mixes up the Prime Minister’s riding with the location of his election-night headquarters. The cover of Pierre Poilievre: Biography on Leadership features an image of a man who looks more like Ronald Reagan than the Conservative Leader.
The Good Works of Pierre Poilievre PC MP, meanwhile, lists “Buddhy the Buddha Cat” as its author and features the sentence “Evidence do you speak it?” on the back cover. Its contents include what appears to be a pasted, partially incorrect infobox from Poilievre’s Wikipedia page and a single line of text: “Due to a lack of evidence based research in this area, please use the remaining space for speculation.”
The rest of the $11.51 book is blank.
Many of these books are listed as cheaper than legitimate titles. During a search last week for Chrystia Freeland books, Amazon’s algorithm listed the former finance minister’s own books and Catherine Tsalikis’s House of Anansi-published biography, Chrystia, at the top, but a handful of cheaper, “independently published” titles by untraceable authors followed.
“If you’re somebody who’s looking for a bargain and doesn’t want to pay that price for a real book, there are a ton of really cheap alternatives that that aren’t reliable, and are more-than-likely AI produced,” says Kenneth Whyte, whose Sutherland House Books published a biography of Poilievre by Andrew Lawton.
Authors and publishers depend on a short window after publication to capture public attention and generate press. Fake-flooded search listings are “bleeding away market share from that key window,” John Degen, the chief executive officer of the Writers’ Union of Canada, says. “It’s hard enough making a living as an author, so we don’t need this crap as well.”
