Authors fighting deluge of fake writers and AI-generated books

Mat Auryn has been fighting for two years to stop the sale of books by mysterious authors he says blatantly plagiarized his work.

He's one of many writers in the realm of spirituality and occult literature who have noticed a recent proliferation of self-published books on Amazon by authors who don't appear to actually exist. Some of them pump out hundreds of titles in a single year, with text that often appears to be generated by artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, drowning out works by legitimate authors in search results.

Many, as Auryn has found out, seem to simply rip off existing books, copying the content but altering the phrasing, sometimes turning it into nonsense.

The California-based writer discovered this phenomenon in 2022 when, following the success of his book Psychic Witch, a title popped up in his own Amazon recommendations called Awakening Your Witchy Intuition and Psychic Abilities by Glinda Porter. It looked interesting, so he bought the Kindle version.

"I started skimming through and I was like, 'Holy shit, this is my book,'" he said.

Porter does not appear to have any presence online outside of a short bio that claims she is "an African spiritualist who has been practicing intentional magick since 1995."

A spokesperson for her publisher, Magickal Witches LLC, told CBC in an email that Porter is a real person — but provided no evidence to support this — and said her book "was not intentionally plagiarized." 

Books have been taken down, then reappeared

Since his initial discovery, Auryn has found at least three other books that similarly copied his work, all with similar titles and slight alterations to the text. An AI detection firm determined at least two of them likely used AI, a growing problem that advocates say is devaluing the work of human authors.

"Some of the books, it seems almost like they ran it through some sort of AI program that just changes words here and there, or may rephrase a sentence or two," Auryn said.

He says his publisher, Llewellyn Worldwide, has reported these books to Amazon and had them taken down, only for them to reappear again. Authors cannot contact the people who uploaded the books directly, because Amazon keeps their contact information private.

Auryn posted on Instagram about a book called Psychic Witch Magick by an author named Melissa Gomes that appeared to also copy his 2020 book, right down to the table of contents.

Gomes has 114 titles on Amazon, including Cosmic Body Astrology and Amazing Astral Projection, but only a vague biography with a photo of a smiling older woman. CBC found that the photo originated from a stock image website, under the heading, "Beautiful happy retired woman wearing cozy sweater and short hairdo." The image is used in several online listicles, including one called "30 Short Haircuts Suitable for Older Women."

While Gomes's Psychic Witch Magick had several glowing reviews and an overall 4.1-star rating, it also had several one-star reviews, including one that read, "This was written by a robot. There are sections which are repeated, unfinished paragraphs, the book doesn't make sense."

By late Tuesday, after being contacted by CBC, Amazon had removed Psychic Witch Magick from its website. The company acknowledged it had removed the book, and said in an emailed statement that all books in its store must adhere to its content guidelines, including compliance with intellectual property rights.

Spokesperson Tim Gillman said the company is constantly evaluating the "rapid evolution and expansion of generative AI tools," and that it proactively prevents books from being listed, and removes those that do not adhere to its guidelines.

Amazon did not directly answer CBC's questions about its processes for handling complaints and what it is doing to curb the prevalence of AI-generated books. 

The aesthetic of Gomes's book covers, with long, all-caps subtitles and busy psychedelic backdrops, is strikingly similar to that of several other authors in the spiritual realm who have hundreds of recent credits to their names.

One of the most prominent is Mari Silva, who has 532 titles on a vast range of spiritual and cultural topics spanning world history, but no visible online presence outside of a vague Amazon author bio with a generic silhouetted photo of a woman — a photo that CBC found on dozens of other unrelated websites.

Porter, Gomes and Silva all have books available at major bookstores, including Indigo in Canada. Indigo did not respond to CBC's request for comment.

Detection firm is confident books used AI

Originality.ai, an Ontario-based firm that detects AI content, examined samples of three books for CBC. A sample from Gomes's Psychic Witch Magick scored 97 per cent, while two samples from Silva's book Dark Goddesses scored 95 and 99 per cent. Two samples from Mahdi Qhurbani's Pyschic Witch, another one Auryn said plagiarized his work, scored 100 per cent on its AI detection score. A higher score means it is more likely to be AI, with 100 being the highest. 

This means the firm's systems have a "very high confidence level" that all three books used an AI-powered writing tool like ChatGPT. Porter's book did not provide an online sample and is listed as "currently unavailable" on Amazon, but the publisher told CBC it does not publish AI content.  

Auryn says the copycat books contain phrases that make no sense. For example, his book has a section about "shadow work," a derivative of a psychological concept developed by Carl Jung, and one of the copycat books rephrased it as a "shadow lover." 

"Just by changing a couple words, it totally loses what it's trying to say and what you're trying to do," he said. 

Auryn says decades of experience and training go into his books, and each one takes at least a year to write, which makes it frustrating to see the proliferation of seemingly AI-generated rip-offs that can be created almost instantaneously.

"It can really hurt people," he said. "Most people in my genre don't make a living off their books, as it is. And then to have these companies, people, AI, pumping out this information, pushing it to the top of the algorithm and burying books written by real people with real experience, it's really disheartening."

Authors in the occult realm started writing blogs and posting on social media about the proliferation of "fake witchy authors" in 2020, pointing out troves of books with similar aesthetics and author names.

It's a problem that spans genres.

Scam books 'devalue' work of human authors: advocate

Last year, Jane Friedman, who writes and reports on the publishing industry, noticed several books listed under her own name on Amazon that she didn't write and suspected were AI-generated. Friedman told CBC at the time she felt violated and angry, and called the books "bloviating garbage," with repetitive writing that read like a "bad student essay."

The books were removed after a fight with Amazon, a success she credited to social media pressure and help from the Authors Guild advocacy group, which is advocating for laws to require labelling AI text.

Several mushroom foraging books on Amazon that appeared to be written by AI chatbots, meanwhile, sparked warnings last year from fungi experts, who said they contained false information that could lead to someone consuming toxic mushrooms.

Amazon said last year that it started requiring writers who want to sell books through its e-book program to tell them in advance that their work includes AI material — but the company does not disclose that information to consumers.

Umair Kazi, the Authors Guild's director of advocacy and policy, says authors are worried about these books taking away from their sales, sometimes dominating Amazon's charts in certain categories and making human-authored books harder to find. 

"You can generate a book using ChatGPT in a few hours that that might take an author a year or several years to write, and then they're competing in the same marketplace," he told CBC. 

"So that fundamentally devalues the work of human authors, even apart from the scam ... or the spammy angle of it, which also devalues other works because they might distract a buyer from getting the actual book."