After receiving an email from a reader about suspicious books on her Amazon profile, author Jane Friedman took a look for herself.
Alongside her books “The Business of Being a Writer” and “Author In Progress,” Friedman said she found several titles about how to write best-selling e-books, which set off alarm bells. Though she’s spent 25 years covering the publishing industry—a fact the marketing description noted—she didn’t write those books.
But Friedman said she had an idea of who—or rather what—did.
“I’ve played around with AI tools enough to realize this was most likely AI-generated work,” she said in a recent interview with Bloomberg Law.
Friedman took to social media to share her experience finding the books, which she said read like “copypasta,” online slang for large blocks of text reproduced verbatim many times. A flood of responses from authors proved she wasn’t alone; other writers had also had their names misappropriated.
While scam books have existed almost as long as publishing, and online booksellers have had to combat the phenomenon, generative artificial intelligence presents uncharted territory. People can now use the tool to almost instantly produce large swaths of text in the writing style of existing authors—and list them for sale on sites like
“We suspect they are either feeding that author’s work into an AI program, or they’re using an AI program that already has all of that author’s work,” said Mary Rasenberger, chief executive officer of the Authors Guild, the country’s oldest professional organization for published writers.
More than 10,000 authors have signed a recent letter from the Authors Guild to tech companies including
“We’re at a tipping point,” Jonathan Lyons, a partner at Lyons & Salky Law LLP who also works as a literary agent at Curtis Brown, said about generative AI. “And I’m not sure we have the mechanism in place right now to deal with it.”
Right of Publicity
While Friedman was able to get the books taken down from Amazon within a few days, she said not everyone has her visibility or the knowledge she developed as a writer covering business strategy for authors.
“My biggest concern for writers is that most of them are not prepared to deal with this,” she said. “They’re not familiar with IP law in the way that I am.”
Amazon’s automated systems to take down IP-infringing listings don’t leave room for nuance, Friedman said. Prompted to name the work that had been infringed on its official channels, Friedman responded that her case wasn’t copyright infringement but rather a right-of-publicity issue. It wasn’t that her existing work was being pirated, but rather that her name and likeness were being attached to a book without her permission.
“That’s not copyright infringement in and of itself if you’re creating a completely new work under someone else’s name,” said David Boag, founder of IP firm Boag Law.
Boag and Friedman both noted that copyright law doesn’t protect against works written in the style or voice of an author—only more tangible expression is protected.
Rasenberger said Amazon should make it easier for authors to resolve right-of-publicity issues. The Authors Guild can help members escalate complaints to Amazon, she said, but companies need to have processes in place to track when an author’s work has been used in an AI output.
Amazon spokesperson Lindsay Hamilton said in a statement to Bloomberg Law that the company investigates all concerns raised by authors.
“We welcome author feedback and work directly with authors to address any issues they raise and where we have made an error, we correct it,” Hamilton said.
Volunteer Burdens
After Friedman got the fake books removed from Amazon, she said they were still floating around Goodreads.
Amazon’s more decentralized subsidiary suggested in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Friedman should join a librarian’s group to request the books’ removal. That’s because Goodreads’ book data is largely managed by a host of volunteer librarians.
“They don’t really seem to regulate content at all, it seems like books are scraped largely from Amazon but also potentially other sites,” said Laura May, who’s been a platform librarian for longer than she can remember. “When I’m doing librarian duties, it’ll be because I’ve seen a book that has an error in it.”
May said it’s hard to differentiate titles from authors who share the same names on Goodreads, let alone books that could be fraudulent.
There are routes volunteers can take to address issues like Friedman’s, she said. According to the platform’s librarian manual, book records can be deleted in appropriate circumstances. May said she can change authors’ names to alert users of piracy or other fraud.
She also has ideas for further steps Goodreads could take, such as adding a “tag” function that can mark content as fan-fiction or AI-generated to delineate it from authors’ original work.
“We have clear guidelines on which books are included on Goodreads and will quickly investigate when a concern is raised, removing books when we need to,” Goodreads spokesperson Suzanne Skyvara said in a statement to Bloomberg Law.
Goodreads and Amazon confirmed to Bloomberg Law that the fake books Friedman found have since been removed from both sites.
Forging Paths Forward
A blogger since 2008, Friedman said the expansive body of her work online has become a “double-edged sword,” making her vulnerable to AI-created knockoffs.
She said she’s working with a lawyer now to trademark her name, making it a legally protectable source identifier for books. Doing so would allow her to utilize Amazon’s “brand registry,” which enables “proactive protections” according to Amazon’s website.
The move is a bit unusual, Boag said, because authors generally don’t have trademarks for their name. Some trademark the titles of their book series—single book titles aren’t eligible for trademarks in the US—but that doesn’t help combat fraudulent publications listed under their names.
“It’s not a bad idea to do it early on,” he said, noting that the idea of trademark is to protect “brands.”
Because laws about right to publicity differ state-to-state, Boag said, copyright law is also an important tool. If authors can point to any places in AI books that directly copy their work, they can make infringement claims. Lyons, the literary agent and lawyer, emphasized the need for Congress to pass legislation regulating AI—both within the publishing industry and beyond.
In the meantime, Friedman said she’s still not completely opposed to the technology, but cautioned that guardrails are necessary.
“I was generally AI-neutral, maybe slightly AI-positive. I see a lot of opportunity in that for writers and publishers,” Friedman said, noting the technology’s ability to cut costs through innovations like synthetic audio books. “Companies—I just don’t think they are doing enough to consider the ramifications of what’s going to happen.”
