Booksology A daily summary of literary headlines at the intersection of today’s books, books, politics, culture, media and more.
AI clones are available on Amazon
This is how it works. Authentic books by the author (self-pub or tradition) are listed on Amazon. Next, scammers who think they might be interested in the book will “read” the book and use AI to rewrite the content using different languages. The author’s name will be changed, but will remain close enough to cause confusion. A cover image is generated (in this case, several kinds of deepfakes that look like the person in question. Then upload this ai-abomination to Amazon and charge a few dollars for a Kindle-only version (or a few more dollars more than with an AI-generated audiobook). The strategy (if you’ve fallen into “East of Eden Overview” and knowing this before) but as I wrote yesterday, the speed of fraud is orders of magnitude different.
scholarship
I remember when I was a graduate, I first heard that I had received a “scholarship for research” for some (all?). Essentially, the Academic Slash Fund that can be used for anything that could be reasonably considered to support research. And most of the cash went to books. I couldn’t imagine blowing away a book worth around $5,000 a year. But like most, even something that looks so clean and pure is not all treatments. A good work by Deb Olin Unferth.
