Joanna Stern at New Things, last month:
Last month, just days after my book went on sale, AI knockoffs of
the ebook version flooded Apple Books. There was Joanna Stern On
I Am Not A Robot by Sophie Mercer. I AM NOT A ROBOT by Finn
Tech. I AM NOT A ROBOT by Joana Stern — with one “n.” (Watch
our latest video showing all these titles and more.)
In total, I found ten AI-generated ebooks clearly riding on mine,
with AI-generated covers mimicking the style of my real one — the
same blue, yellow and red color palette. Most were priced at
$9.99, but some have gone as high as $20.99. [...]
After I contacted Apple about my own book’s clones back in May,
the knockoffs quickly disappeared. [...] But now, a month after
that first Apple cleanup, the problem is back. At the start of
this week, there were at least three other I AM NOT A ROBOT
counterfeits on Apple Books. (They seem to have since been
removed.)
And I’m not alone. Lena Dunham’s Famesick has multiple
lookalikes on the platform. Haley Sacks’s Future Rich Person has
copycats that even use AI generated images of women on the cover
that resemble the real author.
Kashmir Hill at The New York Times today (gift link):
Recently, I received a strange text from a new acquaintance. “You
have your own biography???” it read. “How did you neglect to tell
me this?”
This was news to me. I went to Amazon to investigate. There it
was. A biography of Kashmir Hill — title: “The Biography of
Kashmir Hill” — had been released nearly a year earlier, in
August 2025. My life story had a mottled brown cover and a
publisher I’d never heard of before. It had no reviews until I
wrote one, asking, as the subject of this work, if I could please
speak to the author. The hardcover cost $26.99, which seemed a
bit steep, but my editor splurged on a copy and I was forced to
read it.
My biography is 90 pages long and should be shorter. It combines
facts about me that are widely available on the internet, such as
where I grew up, with generic insights that could be true of
anyone, like a horoscope spread over dozens of pages. “You cannot
understand Kashmir Hill without understanding her
contradictions,” my biographer wrote, along with an
excruciatingly long description of my elaborate coffee-making
ritual. (Fact check: My husband does it.)
It’s not just an e-book problem. Printing services are so cheap nowadays that some of these mooks (like one “author” Hill spoke to) are commissioning print editions for hundreds of these slopfests.
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