You might have seen the article in the Irish Independent this weekend (huge thanks to them for covering) about fake Sam Blake books – but for anyone who got a notification from Amazon that I have written a dark romantasy trilogy (cover below), I haven’t. Please don’t buy any of the books.
These books are (apparently) AI generated and (definitley) absolutely nothing to do with me.
And yes, they have copied my covers (or AI has) so they look remarkably similar to my own books. I know readers who received the notification and who bought them – do please contact Amazon to say you purchased under false pretences and get a refund from Amazon. If you can leave a review saying that they are disappointing content, this will help too.
Huge thanks to the reader in Australia who let me know. Amazon have unhooked these books from my profile. However, they have now been attributed to me across a range of sites including Fantastic Fiction and Goodreads.
Which frankly, is migraine inducing.
Amazon acted quickly when they were alerted, but I’ve been backwards and forwards with them to get a clear idea of what else they can do, but this seems to be very limited. I was hoping that the fake books could be marked as AI content or (this is definitley wishful thinking) taken down. But they don’t contravene Amazon guidelines, and perhaps there is someone else out there who is called Sam Blake who writes dark romantasy, ably assisted by ChatGBT, Grok, or Deep Seek.
And worse, this fraud has been enabled by big tech (allegedly) stealing our books to feed their Large Language Models which are what feeds AI – AI only knows how to string words together because it’s been trained on what is estimated to be 70 million books and 80 million academic articles. 
In a recent class action case in the US, Meta employees gave evidence indicating that they had (allegedly) been instructed to use data from a pirate website, Library Genesis (LibGen) to train Meta’s Llama3 AI platform (as opposed to paying authors for it, an expensive and mammoth logistical task clearly beyond the capabilities of a company with a turnover of $134.34B.) When The Atlantic online newspaper published a tool enabling authors to check if their books have been pirated by LibGen, I discovered that ten of mine were listed on the database. Ten years work.
Google is now presenting an AI summary with every search, often with incorrect details. Google’s AI tool says: Creativity is important because it drives innovation and problem-solving, enabling individuals and societies to adapt to change and find new, effective solutions to complex challenges. It also significantly contributes to personal well-being and happiness, helping people express themselves, gain new perspectives, reduce stress, and live more fulfilling lives. Furthermore, creativity is a crucial skill for career success, fostering adaptability and providing a competitive edge in the workplace….Books are important because they are powerful tools for expanding knowledge, fostering empathy, and stimulating the mind.
Unfortunately this is just the start of issues presented by generative AI – illustrators, musicians, and voice over artists are seeing their work being reproduced without permission, in breach of copyright law. Translators are seeing work that they should be doing, being processed by AI. But it’s not flawless, AI hallucinates, it makes things up, it connects a with b in its database and comes up with z.
It’s got that right at least.
Read more here on the Newstalk website, and listen to me discussing the problem with Andrea Gilligan on Lunchtime Live.
And this photo from Ireland AM captures my shock at discovering these fake books (thank you Ruth O’Leary!)
If you’re an author, join the @thesocietyofauthors to help fight this – and do check your own Amazon profile to make sure nothing extra has crept in.
