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AI VS AUTHORS
From imitating books to imitating authors, AI continues to upend the writing world, writes Gary Dalkin.
Author Ian Shircore recently reported on the website United Ghostwriters, that unscrupulous ‘publishers’ are producing AI-facilitated pastiches of non-fiction books and memoirs which skirt copyright law by rewriting and rearranging the material while keeping the content and sometimes even title almost the same.
Shircore gives the example of writer Kate Thompson, who spent 18 months working on a biography of Holocaust survivor Renee Salt. The book debuted in February from Seven Dials, part of the giant Hachette publishing group, as both a traditional hardback and an e-book under the title A Mother’s Promise: My True Story of Surviving Auschwitz and the Horrors of the Holocaust. Less than a week later an AI-generated imitation appeared for Kindle as Renee Salt Memoir: A Mother’s Promise, A Holocaust Survivor’s Story of Love, Loss and Unbreakable Hope, supposedly written by ‘Jude Williams’. Following a complaint to Amazon this title was removed, only to be replaced by From Darkness to Light: The Remarkable Journey of Holocaust Survivor Renee Salt, this time the author being ‘Penny Pincher’.