When ChatGPT first launched, most of the conversation centered on AI-generated student essays, deepfake images and the threat of automated fake news. Books, however, felt different.
As someone who reads and reviews half a dozen books a month for ReaderViews, I've always found a certain comfort in the traditional publishing process. Bringing a book to market has historically required editors, designers, proofreaders, and, most importantly, an author who actually sat down and wrote it. That barrier to entry gave books an inherent authority that standard websites and fleeting social media posts often lacked.
Then I read a recent New York Times investigation into AI-generated biographies appearing on Amazon. These included books about living public figures that were riddled with factual mistakes and seemingly produced with zero human oversight.
I wondered: Could I actually spot one in the wild? I opened Amazon and started searching.
Most of the listings looked completely normal
The most surprising part of the whole experiment was at first glance, nothing looked unusual. All the books with AI-generated content featured professional-looking covers, convincing descriptions, reasonable price points, and even star ratings. Nothing immediately screamed "AI." If I hadn't intentionally gone looking for them, I probably would have assumed they were entirely legitimate.
Once I dug a little deeper, however, the facade started to crack — and the first thing that tipped me off was the author pages. I clicked on the name behind one biography and landed on the page of someone called John Crane Miller, described as a "seasoned biographer and cultural analyst" with a stock-photo portrait. Miller had published ten biographies in a single week, all about journalists and public figures, and when Kashmir Hill left a public review on Amazon asking to speak with him, his books quietly vanished. He wasn't the only phantom.
A study by Originality.ai found entire catalogs built by authors who appeared to be fabricated identities, one of whom had published 74 books in five months on topics ranging from porn addiction to solo parenting to toxic workplaces. No single person writes like that. These weren't prolific indie authors with a strong work ethic; they were fake names attached to automated output.
Marketing copy was a dead giveaway
Blurb after blurb leaned on the same broad promises and eerily familiar phrasing — "delve into," "comprehensive guide," "unlock the secrets of" — without ever explaining what made the book worth reading over any other book on the same topic.
After half a dozen of these, I could practically predict the next sentence before I read it. The marketing copy wasn't just generic; it was interchangeable, as if the same prompt had been run through the same model with only the subject swapped out.
The biographies were the most troubling category, and the wave of books about tech journalist Kara Swisher illustrated why. Multiple unauthorized biographies of Swisher appeared on Amazon around the release of her memoir "Burn Book," written by authors with no apparent journalism credentials and no indication they had ever spoken to Swisher or anyone in her orbit.
Political scientist Ian Bremmer encountered the same phenomenon: books bearing his name as a subject, produced without his involvement, that simply scraped and summarized what was already freely available online. This is, of course, exactly what chatbots are built to do, that is, synthesize existing information into fluent, confident-sounding prose. The result is a product that looks and feels like a real book but contributes nothing a reader couldn't get from the source material itself.
Beyond books
Substack recently launched an AI detection feature in partnership with a company called Pangram, letting readers scan any post to see an estimate of how much was written by a human versus generated by AI.
Substack CEO Chris Best framed it as a way to keep the platform from becoming "like LinkedIn," overrun with hollow AI content, but even Substack acknowledges the tool isn't perfect. The Atlantic found that Pangram's accuracy is far from bulletproof, and critics worry about false positives flagging legitimate human writers.
Still, the fact that a major publishing platform felt compelled to build this feature at all says something about how urgent the problem has become. Amazon, for its part, has no equivalent.
The takeaway
As someone who absolutely loves to read, I found this to be a very interesting experiment. My takeaway is that now, instead of trusting a listing at face value, I take a few extra minutes to look up the author outside of Amazon to see if they have a credible publishing history elsewhere, and I specifically hunt down professional reviews rather than relying on standard star ratings.
I always preview the sample text to check if the writing feels robotic or relies on repetitive phrasing, and for nonfiction, I actively look for evidence of real human interviews and original citations. None of these steps individually guarantee a book was written by a human, but together, they make it much easier to separate thoughtful, researched work from automated content designed just to game search results.
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