When an author is robbed by AI, we all suffer. Readers who pay good money to buy books that are simply copyright-dodging rehashes of real memoirs and non-fiction get ripped off. Authors, usually working for jaw-droppingly low royalties anyway, have absolutely no comeback under present intellectual property laws.

This is how it works.

An author spends a long time—always months, often years—researching and writing a book that is original in its thinking or sheds light on a story we have not come across before.

But from the moment it’s published, the AI vultures are circling.

Within weeks, they will produce one or more books with very similar titles and virtually identical content, all clumsily stirred and rearranged by ChatGPT or Gemini or Meta AI in order to sidestep today’s copyright laws (which don’t, for example, protect a title at all, and only protect the actual expression of a story or a work of non-fiction).

You can’t be done for stealing someone else’s work, however blatantly, as long as you change the wording around.

This is naked piracy. Or, if not completely naked, barely concealed behind a pretty skimpy legalistic figleaf.

These shadow books don’t involve any creativity, any skill or any work. They are produced, purely for the money, by the most despicable bottom-feeders in the publishing world. They generally use almost all the direct quotes from the key personalities (without their permission, of course) and they depend entirely on exploiting the genuine research and insight that can be found in the original books.

These AI copycat versions then appear on Amazon, for example, alongside the real thing, confusing buyers, selling hundreds or thousands of copies, disappointing readers and effectively denying real authors the rewards they should be earning.   

Of course, it’s not AI itself that does the dirty deed. It’s the people who use it so cynically.

They are parasitic criminals, stealing other people’s property just as ruthlessly as the mugger in the street. And I don’t give a damn that the law has not caught up yet and defined this kind of activity as a crime.

It will. And it better had. Because if it doesn’t, the whole ecology that provides us with nearly 200,000 new and varied books each year will fall apart.

We want authors to write, don’t we? And if they can’t make any sort of reasonable return for their efforts and skill, we will all be the poorer—and, in time, the stupider and less informed.  

Like all theft, this affects everyone, not just the immediate victim. If the government doesn’t act quickly to modernise our copyright laws, there will be very little incentive to add to the sum total of human knowledge—or, for that matter, the world’s understanding of prostate cancer, dahlias, democratic politics or 19th-century train timetables.

If you want to know how this vicious fake books process plays out in practice, I can give you a real and recent example.

It involves Kate Thompson, a fine writer, a lovely person and a one-time member of our United Ghostwriters group. Kate has recently finished writing a book with the remarkable Renee Salt, a 95-year-old survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

On their arrival at Auschwitz, the 14-year-old girl’s father, Szaja, was immediately taken away from her. She never saw him again, and her own survival hung in the balance hour by hour and day by day.

Kate Thompson and the frail Holocaust survivor worked together for 18 months to bring Renee’s story to the public, with Kate travelling backwards and forwards across Europe, tracking down prisoner records, visiting ghettos and gas chambers, or sitting listening aghast to the ‘unfiltered gush of history’ as Renee recalled the macabre events of her early life.

On 7 February this year, their book, A Mother’s Promise: My True Story of Surviving Auschwitz and the Horrors of the Holocaust, was published by Seven Dials, an imprint of Hachette, the world’s third-largest publisher, at £14.99 (hardback) and £9.99 (Kindle edition).

And within a matter of days, another remarkably similar and completely unauthorised version of the same personal story of tragedy, loss and endurance appeared as an e-book on Amazon’s Kindle platform. This upstart volume was entitled Renee Salt Memoir: A Mother’s Promise, A Holocaust Survivor’s Story of Love, Loss and Unbreakable Hope. The author, insofar as there was a human author, was named as one Jude Williams.

This nasty little travesty has disappeared now, after the authors formally complained to Amazon. It has been replaced by From Darkness to Light: The Remarkable Journey of Holocaust Survivor Renee Salt, which is currently available in both paperback (£8.99, with just two damning one-star reviews) and e-book (£5.99). The crude, clunky AI pastiche is credited to ‘Penny Pincher’ and offers the gullible reader an ungenerous 36 pages, compared with the real book’s 289.

I haven’t seen Kate in years, but I do wish her every success.

This is not really about the Kate Thompson book, though. It’s about an ugly phenomenon that’s spreading as fast as money-laundering barbers’ shops. And if serious measures are not introduced to put a stop to it quickly, the whole world of the publishing and bookselling industries will be drastically undermined.

I don’t know where action should be taken first, but I think the MPs on Parliament’s Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport need to look at all this as a matter of extreme urgency. It’s not only about the appropriation of Kate’s work and Renee Salt’s life story. There is an iceberg heading our way. This is just one of the warning signs of a titanic tragedy to come.

Ian Shircore creates books in his own name for fun and ghostwrites other people’s books for a living. His latest bestseller, Conspiracy (Bonnier Books UK), has now sold 90,000 copies.