If you searched for Jane Friedman’s work on Amazon a few weeks ago, you probably saw titles like Navigating Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and Igniting Ideas: Your Guide To Writing A Bestseller eBook on Amazon.
If you knew Friedman’s work, you had no reason to doubt the authenticity of those volumes. After all, Friedman is an industry expert whose books, articles, and newsletters guide aspiring writers struggling to navigate the publishing landscape.
One particular fan, who could not wait to consume the author’s latest releases, snapped these books off the shelf, but what she saw disappointed her. In one article from The Daily Beast, she described Friedman’s latest books as an interesting experiment. Apparently, they were horrendous, and she could not figure out why. Friedman was just as surprised by the revelation because her last book came out in 2018.
The reader in question sent Friedman the books, and the author was horrified to learn the truth. Someone was selling AI-generated books using her name. It would be the equivalent of me writing a novel and slapping George R.R. Martin’s name on the cover. Here is an interesting tidbit about AI, one that many laypeople forget. This technology learns. The more information you feed it, the better it gets at mimicking human responses.
Friedman mentioned in The Guardian that she started blogging in 2009. As such, there is more than enough online content from her to train an AI model to replicate her work. Naturally, Friedman’s fans could spot the anomalies when they read the AI-generated books.
But what happens in a decade when some enthusiastic tech genius finally perfects these systems? One expert called Friedman’s case the publishing equivalent of a deep fake. Amazon initially refused to take action because Friedman’s name was not trademarked.
In essence, the intellectual thieves had done nothing criminally wrong. But eventually, they took the books down because Friedman publicized the situation on social media. Sarah Rose (D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed The Resistance) faced a similar challenge.
She had just completed her second novel when a reader told her they had already purchased her next book. Upon visiting Amazon, she found multiple titles with her name on the platform. She tried to take the books down, but Amazon would not play ball.
Friedman has admitted to seeing multiple AI-written YA novels on Amazon. And many of them have topped the platform’s bestseller charts. This introduces a serious problem. People don’t trust indie publishing. Traditional publishing is a pain because it rejects the majority of aspiring authors. However, those seemingly unfair systems guarantee a certain level of quality because they filter out poor writing and incompetent storytelling.
I read one article a while ago which said that traditional publishers only accept 1-2 percent of aspiring writers. Indie publishing is the opposite. Anyone can write and self-publish a book today. It is a simple matter of opening an Amazon account and uploading your manuscript. That sounds like a good thing, but most self-published books are garbage.
Readers will tell you that most indie-published books suck because they come from people that can barely string a sentence together. Some indie-published authors are proficient writers, but it never occurs to them to hire professional proofreaders, editors, and cover artists.
This has contributed to indie publishing’s terrible reputation. The Friedman situation would have destroyed her career had she not publicized it. Other indie-published authors won’t be as lucky. I don’t know if we should panic or simply accept these shenanigans as the new normal.
katmic200@gmail.com
Source: The Observer
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