Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
AI Clones of Books Are Showing Up on Amazon
Here is how this works. A real book from an author (self-pub or traditional) gets listed on Amazon. Then, some scammer thinking there might be interest in that book, uses AI “read” the book and rewrite the contents using different language. The name of the author is changed, but stays close enough to stay confusing. A cover image is generated (in this case some sort of deepfake that sorta-kinda looks like the person in question. Then, you upload this AI-abomination to Amazon, charge a couple of bucks for a Kindle only version (or a few dollars more than that for an AI generated audiobook), and then you hope to catch the coattails of the legitimate books’s marketing, publicity, and other awareness to sell a few copies. This is not exactly a new strategy (if you have ever fallen for the “summary of East of Eden” versus the real thing you know this) but like I wrote yesterday, the speed of cheating differs by an order of magnitude.
The Stipend
When I was a grad student, I remember the first time I heard that some (all?) of the professors got “research stipends.” Basically, an academic slush fund that could be used for anything that could reasonably be considered to support research. And most of that cash went to books. I couldn’t imagine having $5000 or so a year to blow on books. As with most things, though, even something that seems so clean and pure is not a cure-all. Good piece from Deb Olin Unferth.