Amazon removes five AI-generated books falsely credited to author Jane Friedman, after first refusing because she had not trademarked her name

Five books went on sale at Amazon credited to Jane Friedman, an Ohio author who writes about the publishing industry. She wrote none of them. The titles included How to Write and Publish an eBook Quickly and Make Money and A Step-by-Step Guide to Crafting Compelling eBooks, Building a Thriving Author Platform, and Maximizing Profitability. Her actual books are The Business of Being a Writer and Publishing 101. A reader emailed her after spotting the listings. Friedman read the first few pages and concluded the books were "if not wholly generated by AI, then at least mostly generated by AI," noting on her website that she has been blogging since 2009 and "there's a lot of my content publicly available for training AI models."

She submitted a claim form. Amazon told her it would not remove the books because she had not trademarked her name. The titles came down from both Amazon and Goodreads by Tuesday, which Friedman attributes to her posting about the problem on social media. An Amazon spokesperson said the company has "clear content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale" and "invest[s] heavily to provide a trustworthy shopping experience." Friedman's assessment: "They have no procedure for reporting this sort of activity where someone's trying to profit off someone's name." She has asked the sites to build a way to verify authorship.