Well, why not?

The New York Times has an interesting article by Kashmir Hill, about her reaction to discovering a 90-page AI biography of herself on Amazon. Here’s a link to the piece at The San Francisco Examiner. To say the biography wasn’t very good understates the case: just a collection of a few disparate facts and fictions cobbled together by AI. What makes a person make such a book? Ms Hill tries to locate the author of her biography but manages only to find another “writer”, Bill Jones, who publishes ten AI-generated books a month on Amazon (the most they’ll allow) — he now has 445 books available on Amazon. He is quite content to sell few copies of any one of them, even in several cases, no copies at all. Indeed he claims if he gets a really negative review of one of his books he takes the offending volume down. “I don’t take [the reviews] personally” he says, and as Ms Hill comments “Why would he? He didn’t, technically speaking, write the book.” He compiles his books as a pastime in his…