A bestselling Irish author has said she was shocked to learn an AI company had “ripped off” her writting style and was selling books under her name on Amazon.
Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin is better known by her pen name, Sam Blake, and has written multiple best sellers.
On Lunchtime Live, the Wicklow resident said she recently received a message from one fan who was delighted to hear from Amazon she had a new book coming out.
The only problem was that Sam Blake does not have a new book coming out - or at least not until next year.
“I looked it up and sure enough, there was my profile on Amazon with this dark romance book by Sam Blake which I had absolutely nothing to do with,” Ms Fox O’Loughlin said.
“It was one of those, ‘Oh my God’ moments.”
Many of Sam Blake’s fans subscribe to her author’s page on Amazon and buy her books as soon as they are published.
“That means then that they don’t look properly, they just clicked and bought - it’s quite expensive too, it’s not a cheap buy,” Ms Fox O’Loughlin explained.
“I knew a lot of people would have bought this thing and it’s nothing to do with me at all.”
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While Ms Fox O’Loughlin has not read the entirety of ‘Sam Blake’s’ new novel, she read the beginning of it and knew "immediately" it was AI.
“You can put a prompt into an AI machine and it’ll churn you out a book,” she said.
“The large language models that AI have actually been trained on have been trained on authors’ work.
“10 of my books have been apparently sucked into this system.”
'Due diligence'
Since she complained, Amazon has since removed the book from Sam Blake’s author page - however, they are still selling the novel.
“If you are buying something on Amazon, a digital book, just check to see what it is,” Ms Fox O’Loughlin suggested.
“Do a bit of due diligence.”
Ms Fox O’Loughlin continued that she was far from the only author who has had her “identity ripped off” by AI and there is a database that allows authors to check if their work is being used.
“10 of mine [were there],” she said.
“That’s 10 years’ work; it takes a year to write a book.
“It takes 20 seconds to do one by AI, it’s doubly infuriating.”
Main image: An Amazon parcel. Picture by: Alamy.com.
