An author finds multiple “garbage books” uploaded to Amazon under her name, most likely AI-generated, and on Goodreads, which removed them after her complaint
Update: Hours after this post was published, my Goodreads profile was cleaned of the offending titles.
Jane Friedman
Context & Ripple Effects
This episode surfaced on the same day as writer backlash that shut down Prosecraft, underscoring a broader dispute over how literary work and author identities can be repurposed in AI-adjacent systems. The Prosecraft shutdown after writers objected to its book corpus showed that creator consent was already becoming a platform-governance issue.
Goodreads acted after a complaint, but the case highlights a gap between removing a disputed profile entry and preventing false works from reaching interconnected discovery surfaces. Later reports of AI-made books promoted on Kindle lock screens suggest that low-quality synthetic titles can move beyond a storefront listing into recommendation and advertising channels.
First-order effects
The author’s public bibliographic identity was immediately polluted by titles she did not create; Goodreads removed those titles from her profile after she raised the issue.
Amazon and Goodreads face a concrete trust-and-moderation problem: distinguishing legitimate author attribution from likely synthetic or impersonating uploads.
Second-order effects
Authors and publishers may need to spend more time monitoring retail and reader-profile pages, while platforms absorb more disputes over ownership, attribution, and takedowns.
If questionable titles remain searchable or promoted, they can dilute discovery for legitimate books and make metadata quality a commercial issue for retail and recommendation systems.
Third-order effects
As synthetic publishing lowers the cost of producing catalog entries, book platforms may need stronger provenance and identity checks rather than relying chiefly on complaint-driven cleanup.
The pattern points to generative editorial debt: content systems can accumulate inaccurate records whose correction costs are shifted to creators, readers, and downstream discovery tools.
The trend: This is one instance of the synthetic-supply paradox, in which cheaper AI-generated content expands catalog volume faster than platforms can verify authorship and maintain trustworthy discovery.
“But here's what does rankle me: garbage books getting uploaded to Amazon where my name is credited as the author... Whoever's doing this is obviously preying on writers who trust my name and think I've actually written these books. I have not. Most likely they've been generate…
Jfc. If AI-gen books weren't bad enough, now scammers are uploading illegitimate books to Amazon/Goodreads with a recognizable author's name on them in the hopes of skimming a few bucks from unsuspecting readers. https://janefriedman.com/... [embedded post]
A sneaky peril for authors on Amazon and Goodreads: fraudulent books (likely AI-authored) being passed off as theirs. @janefriedman.bsky.social reports on her experience. https://janefriedman.com/...
“As of today, there are about half a dozen books being sold on Amazon, with my name on them, that I did not write or publish. Some huckster generated them using AI.” — Amazon refused to remove them. — https://janefriedman.com/...
Must-read post by @janefriedman.bsky.social about a disturbing new publishing trend. Essentially Amazon is allowing scammers to upload books under the names of well known and trusted authors, as has happened to Friedman. https://janefriedman.com/...
As of today, there are about half a dozen books being sold on Amazon, with my name on them, that I did not write or publish. Some huckster generated them using AI. This promises to be a serious problem for the book publishing world. https://janefriedman.com/...
“We desperately need guardrails on this landslide of misattribution and misinformation. Amazon and Goodreads, I beg you to create a way to verify authorship, or for authors to easily block fraudulent books credited to them. Do it now, do it quickly” https://janefriedman.com/...
remember when I tweeted like a month ago do we still have lanham act false over-attribution claims after dastar? seems important & guess we'll find out soon seems like a fit on facts like these, & not a copyright runaround...
Maybe Amazon needs to enact a verification layer to ensure that books being uploaded to their platform are written by who they say they are. There's a whole reputation mgmt component of impersonation & fraud that's become my job to police and it sucks. https://janefriedman.com/..…
THIS: “We desperately need guardrails on this landslide of misattribution and misinformation. Amazon and Goodreads, I beg you to create a way to verify authorship, or for authors to easily block fraudulent books credited to them.” https://janefriedman.com/...
Read this important piece from Jane Friedman today. Remembered that there has been a fake Charlotte Ashley pulping out farmed books for years. It was funny at the time, but now I really, hope none of the agents I have been querying looked me up. 😬 https://janefriedman.com/...
I count 20 @StephenKing books, 20 @jodipicoult books, plus books by tons of other contemporary writers (@legroff, Madeline Miller, Angie Thomas... just search and they're pretty much in there). Did any of these authors/publishers consent to this use of their work?
Watching weird tech people get seduced by mega corp boldness into believing the lie that all art is “content” and like “content” produced by novices, is unprotected and available for use has been very 😃 This guy is about to get sued by all ten of the largest publishers at once.
How DARE you, @benji_smith I demand you take my book off your site immediately. I do not consent to this, and never did. And I know my publisher never would [image]
He took the website down but that doesn't account for the theft and the database he fed our books into. Publishers and authors need to be aggressive and not let this go. Guys like this will just let the fury die down and quietly restart.
Speaking of which, this might be of interest to writers out there (and anyone else concerned about AI being trained on writing by humans, without consent): https://authorsguild.org/...
I'm not worried about AI writing being *better* than works by actual humans. But I *am* worried about companies (wrongly) thinking they can replace human writers with AI. And companies should DEFINITELY not be able to train AI on other people's work w/o consent or compensation.
This company Prosecraft appears to have stolen a lot of books, trained an AI, and are now offering a service based on that data https://blog.shaxpir.com/...
Adding insult to injury, the site doing the “analysis” doesn't seem to understand what passive voice is, and arbitrarily assigns each word a “vividness” score, and then scores the book's “vividness” on that.