Author Jane Friedman finds AI-generated books sold under her name on Amazon

Publishing-industry writer Jane Friedman discovered several books she had not written listed for sale on Amazon under her name, and copies had also propagated to her author profile on Goodreads. Titles included guides such as How to Write and Publish an eBook Quickly and Make Money, priced and formatted in a way she said resembled AI-generated content, produced by prompting a chatbot with her decade and a half of publicly available blogging.

Friedman reported the listings to Amazon and asked for their removal. The company’s response, she wrote, was to ask for a trademark registration number for her name; when she explained she had none, Amazon closed the case and declined to remove the books. She published an account of the exchange on 7 August 2023, arguing that neither Amazon’s content policies nor copyright law gave an author any real recourse against being impersonated as the “author” of work she had no part in.

The post spread quickly on social media, and the Authors Guild said it would try to intervene through direct contact with Amazon. Within roughly a day of publication, Amazon removed the fraudulent titles from sale and Goodreads scrubbed them from Friedman’s profile. Amazon did not explain which policy the books had violated, framing the removal as a correction rather than acknowledging the earlier refusal. Friedman said publicly that she doubted the outcome would have been different without the public pressure.

The episode became a widely cited early example of a distinct harm from generative text tools — not plagiarism of a specific work, but the mass production of low-quality books falsely attributed to a real, identifiable person, exploiting marketplaces that had no verification mechanism for authorship claims. It fed into wider Authors Guild advocacy that year for both platform accountability and, separately, litigation over the use of authors’ works in AI training data.