Last fall, horror writer Brian Evenson got some surprising news: he’d apparently written and published a new novel.
The book, In The Shadows: A Horror Mystery Story, was listed on Amazon under Evenson’s name. Although it’s linked to some of Evenson’s other works in Amazon’s author database, including Last Days and Song For the Unraveling of the World, the book is wildly different from the works that have earned Evenson a devoted fanbase over the years. It has no reviews, a stock photo for cover art, and jacket copy that doesn’t actually describe the book:
The definition of scary changes from person to person. For some, it might be ghosts and haunted houses. For others, serial killers. For still others, the most frightening things are the ones that go bump in the night, unseen. Despite the width of this spectrum, what unites all lovers of horror is the thrill that horror novels inspire within that universal sensation of your heart thumping out of your chest, as cold sweat breaks on your forehead when you turn the page.
It didn’t take Evenson long to figure out what was going on. Someone was using his name to sell an A.I.-generated novel. Even worse, there was nothing he could do about it.
“I found out about it in October of 2023 when a reader of mine from outside of the country wrote to me asking if this was really a book by me,” Evenson told The Mary Sue. “Something about it seemed to him off: The title didn’t feel right, and the look of the cover was just so different from my other books … Apparently it had been [on Amazon] since March of 2023.
“I was stunned, and pretty upset,” Evenson said. “And when I realized how little ability I had to rectify the situation, I began to feel helpless.”
Evenson contacted Amazon to have the listing taken down, but the retailer refused, instead adding a note about the fraud to the product listing, and allowing readers to post reviews explaining that the book isn’t actually written by Evenson. Meanwhile, the book proliferated, appearing on Barnes and Noble’s website and Goodreads.
But how could Evenson tell the book was A.I.-generated? What if there was simply another Brian Evenson out there who’d decided to try his hand at horror writing?
The book has all the hallmarks of A.I.—the generic title, the vapid description—but Evenson confirmed it after a little sleuthing. According to his doppelganger’s author bio, the second Brian Evenson was “called ‘one of the world’s foremost authors of books about programming’ by International Developer magazine.” Along with In the Shadows, Evenson No. 2 was also supposedly the author of several guides to Python and Java. However, after googling the first few works of the bio, Evenson found that his identity had been melded with that of a programmer named Herbert Schildt.
And what about the publisher? Was there any human being that Evenson and his fans could contact to figure out what was going on? Nope. Wilson Publishers, the supposed entity behind the books, has no contact information or web presence—although its name is conveniently similar to several legitimate presses.
A.I. book scams are getting worse
Evenson’s struggle isn’t the first time scammers have used A.I. to sell fraudulent books.
Last year, another author, Jane Friedman, found that A.I.-generated books were being sold under her name. Meanwhile, foraging expert Alexis Nikole, known on social media as the Black Forager, reported that A.I.-generated foraging guides were proliferating on Amazon. These books were supposedly written by authors who didn’t seem to actually exist, and real foragers worried that the books would lead readers to find and eat poisonous plants.
And there are plenty more horror stories—so to speak—aside from that one. A.I. expert Melanie Mitchell found that Amazon was selling clumsily plagiarized copies of her books, under the name of an author who didn’t exist. Another author, Rory Cellan-Jones, found an A.I.-generated biography of him that Amazon promoted instead of his own memoir. Amazon has made some halting attempts to stem the tide of A.I. gobbledygook, like prohibiting self-publishing authors from listing more than three books a day, but the problem continues.
And the A.I. scammers aren’t the only ones to blame.
Online retailers are allowing scammers to flourish
Although A.I. is new, the problem of multiple authors with the same name is an old one. It’s a problem that organizations like the Library of Congress found a solution to decades ago. The secret is simple: have a human being verify which books are written by which authors, and tag them accordingly. (The Library of Congress, for example, uses birthdates to distinguish between different authors in their catalog.) True, this approach doesn’t allow retailers to sell near-infinite amounts of useless garbage, but it would allow them to ensure that what they do sell is actually of value.
Until Amazon, Goodreads, and other sites catch up, though, authors will continue to find fraudulent and mistagged works under their names. It even happened to me: Many years ago I published a novel through a micro-press, and now a second book is listed under my name on Goodreads. Like Evenson and other authors, I tried to get it corrected, and like their efforts, mine went nowhere.
“There’s just going to be more and more of this kind of thing as bad actors use AI to appropriate identities and try to make a quick buck, and it’s going to be harder to find the real books,” Evenson says. “Amazon is keeping the onus of reporting it and stopping it on the writers who are being taken advantage of rather than doing the ethical thing of simply taking the book down. There is absolutely no reason that [In The Shadows] should still be on their site at this point.”
Yet it is—and unless retailers take responsibility for fraudulent listings, others will continue to join it.
(featured image: Talaj / Getty Images)
Published: Feb 19, 2024 03:57 pm