Churning out A.I. biography

[MsAmerica]

I Got Slopped
Someone used A.I. to write my biography. Thousands more of those books are polluting Amazon. Who is behind all this drivel?
By Kashmir Hill

The number of e-books published per month had tripled since the release of ChatGPT, to more than 300,000 at the end of last year, from around 100,000 in 2022. (Amazon said that its internal metrics did not show that level of growth, but would not share its figures.)...

Bill Johns, at his home on the Chesapeake Bay, got hooked on making books with A.I. after he retired. Actually writing a book is a “romantic” notion, he says, “but it doesn’t make economic sense.”... Mr. Johns now has 445 books for sale on Amazon.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html

Who is buying this complete shite? It drives me mad - destroying the planet to make a few quid from slop

😱😱😱😱😱😱😱
I saw an article yesterday about AI buying up rare books, digitalising then destroying the original books. Of course they can then be altered for nefarious purposes. WTF?
1984 has arrived.

How does AI walk into a shop, pick up a book, pay for it, or later put it in a shredder?! It has no hands or feet! I think you’ll find humans are doing the majority of the work there, the AI is likely just digitising it. All of these shit uses for AI are coming from humans.

Digitizing out of print, out of copyright books to make them more widely available is beneficial. I've found all sorts of obscure stuff on archive.org which I would never have been able to access otherwise.

It's not just 'AI', whoever that is; Google has been doing it for years. As have various universities, societies and special interest groups to make material available.

And a book might be rare, but 'AI' is unlikely to own the only copy. In the UK, there'll be one in the British Library, one in the Bodleian, one in Cambridge University library, one each in the national libraries of Wales and Scotland, and also possibly copies in private or specialist libraries.

And destroying books isn't new either. Libraries have been discarding unwanted stock for years.

A Cambridge academic once told me that the University library discarded its collection of manuscripts when printing came in. Apparently they still have the catalogue to tell them what was once there.

There are a great many things wrong with AI, but digitizing rare books isn't one of them.

You think they're digitising books out of the goodness of their hearts for historical archive purposes?

They're training their models on the non-polluted, pre-AI text in them and I would bet my house that they will then gatekeep access to the information behind a paywall.

I saw this too - I actually went onto Snopes to see if it was real as it seemed so outlandish (Snopes didn't have any info).

You think they're digitising books out of the goodness of their hearts for historical archive purposes?

Who is 'they'?

And a great many books have already been digitised and are not behind paywalls.

Accessible but not hysterical link to the story so that people know what is being discussed:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/

[ETA this is an older post about the concept; I don't know anything about the more recent talk of rare books being specifically targeted, anyone have a link to that?]

You think that Mumsnet is allowing you to post on threads from the goodness of their hearts for.... what??

Everything we do is monetised - ai is no different

Here's a link, it's not the one I read yesterday, but you get the gist. It's Anthropic. And I haven't got a problem with books etc. being digitised, after all that's what Kindle does (and the books are then only licensed to you, you don't actually own them). But I'm uncomfortable with hundreds of thousands of actual books being destroyed and these companies raking the money in to the detriment of the writers. As a painter by trade I know what's happening to artists. And musicians.
And the OP's original post just adds to the general enshittification of all the arts.

In general, I don't understand why people would buy crappy books, and it's even more puzzling when it's nonfiction!

DESTROYING the original?

AUGH!

Thanks so much for the link. (Even the photograph is upsetting.)

Which is why I always come back to Craigslist, which makes so little effort to extract anything from its users.