(NewsNation) — The popularity of Leland Vittert’s best-selling book “Born Lucky” apparently has some looking to cash in on the success.
Several AI deepfakes of the book have been sold on Amazon, leading some to accidentally purchase the books without realizing they are not authored by the “On Balance” host.
“This isn’t really about me, because I’ll be OK, and we appreciate you knowing which book to buy, but there’s a lot of people getting scammed out of a lot of hard earned money by buying the fake books,” Vittert said.
Jane Friedman, a publishing industry reporter and author of “The Business of Being a Writer,” joined NewsNation to discuss the trend.
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“They are authors, if you can call them that, using AI chat bots to generate entire books based on using your name, using publicly available facts about you, and then they’re spitting out, usually, 50 to 100 page books.
“We can put ‘books’ in quotation marks there, and then they’re uploading them to Amazon through something called Kindle Direct Publishing,” Friedman explained.
She added Amazon has implemented “light guardrails” to prevent it occurring, but “it doesn’t stop it when it happens to virtually every single author today who has a new book coming out.”
