According to the Guardian, Rory Cellan-Jones, a former BBC technology correspondent, wrote a memoir untangling the truth about his family history. And later, what had popped up on the Amazon website was a biography of Cellan-Jones, with a poorly designed cover by someone he had never heard of.   

“Like any author, I obsessively check Amazon,” he said. “And this thing popped up.”  

“I thought: ‘This is strange – who’s writing a biography of me?’” Cellan-Jones told the Observer. “I don’t kid myself. It’s difficult enough for me to sell books about myself, [let alone] for other people to sell books about me.”  

After going through a few passages, Cellan-Jones realised that he had fallen victim to a stranger who attempted to piggyback his memoir by publishing a title with text that was apparently generated by Artificial Intelligence.   

Cellan-Jones’s work, Ruskin Park: Syliva, Me and the BBC, explores the story of how he discovered a shoebox of letters from his mother explaining her love affair with his father, a BBC TV director he only met at the age of 23, and how she came to spend most of her life in a one-bedroom south London flat. It is, he said, “about growing up with a single mother and a father who wasn’t there”.  

The book, which detailed his family detective story, was a complete fantasy, the author clarified. “There are passages about the Cellan-Joneses, an academic family sat around the table … His father, a kindly academic; his mother, a teacher.   

“Then Amazon sent me an email saying: ‘You might like this.’ Their algorithm had decided this was a bloody book I would want rather than recommending the book that I’d slaved long and hard over. They’re effectively allowing book spam and recommending it to the very person who is most annoyed by it.”  

This imitation of Cellan-Jones biography and other titles by the pseudonymous author was removed by Amazon, but several more get through the filters intended to segregate low-quality books. This has made it easy for book spammers who intend to release a wide range of titles in a day with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing system that helps the authors publish ebooks and printed books themselves.   

Similarly, in August, Jane Friedman, who usually writes about publishing, forced it to remove five AI-generated fake titles in her name. Regarding this, the chief executive of the Society of Authors, Nicola Solomon, opined that “Amazon is clearly facing significant challenges with the influx of AI-generated products in its stores, and it appears to be playing catchup”.   

Later, the firm confirmed that the publishers of new KDP publications hereafter would need to declare if they included AI-generated content and would be limited to publishing three books daily. “But these small fixes seem more designed to benefit Amazon’s processes than readers and human authors,” she added. The SoA later demanded that Amazon label products as AI-generated and allow readers to filter out the AI titles.   

Eminent authors such as Margaret Atwood, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Pullman shared concerns about their work being used in large language models to train AI without their consent or any compensation or credit. Rashik Parmar, group chief executive of BCS, the chartered institute for IT, said ministers needed to implement legislation to make sure that AI-generated material included a digital watermark to spot them easily.