{"id":"camfeed-171","numeric_id":171,"short_title":"I found an AI book about me","seo_title":"Someone made an AI slop book about me. I'm not alone - ABC News","social_title":"I found an AI slop book written about me","headline":"Someone made an AI slop book about me. I'm not alone","teaser_title":"I found an AI slop book written about me","titles_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-10/cam-wilson-ai-book-copyright-laws/107220714","titles_fetched_at":"2026-10-09T20:08:16+00:00","title":"Someone used AI to create a book about me and sold it online","canonical_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-10/cam-wilson-ai-book-copyright-laws/107220714","published_at":"2026-10-09T19:19:32+00:00","source_modified_at":"2026-10-09T19:19:32+00:00","archive_updated_at":"2026-10-09T23:28:55+00:00","item_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/171","json_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/171.json","markdown_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/171.md","source":"ABC News","source_type":"abc","type":"news article","content_role":"primary","author":"Cameron Wilson","summary":"Cam Wilson, who is the ABC's AI reporter, recently discovered an AI-generated book about him and a book he wrote.","text":"Cam Wilson, who is the ABC's AI reporter, recently discovered an AI-generated book about him and a book he wrote.","has_full_text":true,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":1015,"full_text_status":"ok","full_text_source_url":"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-10/cam-wilson-ai-book-copyright-laws/107220714","full_text_fetched_at":"2026-10-09T20:08:16+00:00","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":"","transcript_char_count":0,"topics":["AI","technology policy","platforms"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"Someone used AI to create a book about me and sold it online\", ABC News, 2026-10-10, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-10/cam-wilson-ai-book-copyright-laws/107220714","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [Someone used AI to create a book about me and sold it online](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-10/cam-wilson-ai-book-copyright-laws/107220714) — ABC News — 2026-10-10","attribution":"Originally published at ABC News. Link to the canonical ABC URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-10/cam-wilson-ai-book-copyright-laws/107220714","related_items":[{"id":"camfeed-173","title":"Someone used AI to write a book about me. So I bought it","canonical_url":"https://webcam.substack.com/p/someone-used-ai-to-write-a-book-about","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/173.json","source_type":"substack","source":"webcam","type":"newsletter commentary","content_role":"commentary","published_at":"2026-10-09T22:50:18+00:00","relation":"Newsletter commentary on ABC article: Someone used AI to create a book about me and sold it online","excerpt":"Hi! Read: I found an AI slop book written about me Honestly, I don't think I've processed how weird this is. Anyway, enjoy! Thanks, CW P.S. I love tips. I also love hearing what people think about stories and can promise 100% confidentiality for anyone who contacts me. Message m...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""},{"id":"camfeed-172","title":"Usually I'm the one writing about AI. But recently, the tables were turned. Someone sent me a link to an 89-page book about \"redefining liv...","canonical_url":"https://mastodon.social/@camwilson/117413204305366149","public_data_url":"https://camfeed.cameronwilson.com.au/items/172.json","source_type":"mastodon","source":"Mastodon","type":"mastodon post","content_role":"promotion","published_at":"2026-10-09T22:01:57+00:00","relation":"Promotes ABC article: Someone used AI to create a book about me and sold it online","excerpt":"Usually I'm the one writing about AI. But recently, the tables were turned. Someone sent me a link to an 89-page book about \"redefining living through Cam Wilson teachings\", seemingly made by AI So, I bought it. Once it arrived, things got even weirder https://www.abc.net.au/new...","has_transcript":false,"transcript_status":"","transcript_kind":""}],"full_text":"A few months back, I was doomscrolling before bed when I received a WhatsApp message from a friend with a link to Amazon.\n\nAs someone who has spent years reporting on technology, and now solely on artificial intelligence, it's pretty common to get tips about something weird that was generated with AI.\n\nUnusually, this tip was about me. Sort of.\n\nThe listing was for a book entitled Conspiracy Nation Exercises: Redefine Living Through Cam Wilson Teachings.\n\nI couldn't know for sure it was something, and not someone, who'd decided to write a book about me, but there were signs.\n\nThe title closely resembled a book of mine that I co-wrote and published last year.\n\nThe \"author\", Leni McAllister, doesn't seem to exist, and the short blurb has the tell-tale signs of AI-generated writing.\n\nIdentifying \"slop\" becomes a sixth sense after you've seen enough of it.\n\nEm dashes. The distinctive tempo. The blurb even had the \"it's not X — it's Y\" that AI seems to love.\n\nSo, I bought the book.\n\nTwo days later, it arrived in the mail. I didn't expect it to be so absurdly big. Like A4-sized-big.\n\nI was able to quickly flick through its meagre 89 pages, although even that number gives a misleading impression about its seriousness. The text was double-spaced and printed in a very large size.\n\nThe moment my bemusement turned to hurt was when I realised that they had chosen Comic Sans — the most unserious of all fonts, and one more closely associated with primary school projects — as a suitable match for my \"teachings\".\n\n'They pop up everywhere'\n\nI'm not a full-time author but, by all accounts, making a living publishing in Australia is extremely gruelling.\n\nI was holding something that probably took longer to leaf through than it did to generate; filled with things I didn't say, poorly written and bizarrely laid out, it was extremely frustrating.\n\nIt felt like the exact opposite of the care and love we poured into our book.\n\nIt also felt like a physical slop that existed not to be enjoyed or understood, but to deceive a prospective reader just long enough to convince them to click \"buy\" online.\n\nI then discovered an infestation of other books online using an identical template, just for different authors and books.\n\nOne author who'd put out her debut book around the same time as me, Natalie Kyriacou, responded with exasperation when I sent her a link to Nature's Last Dance Exercises: Redefine Living through Natalie Kyriacou Teachings.\n\nIt turns out she already knew about this because she'd heard from those who mistakenly bought the fraudulent version of her book off Amazon.\n\n\"We have been trying to remove them but they pop up everywhere,\" she says.\n\nSo I sent Amazon a list of questions. The next day, the listing for \"my\" book was taken down.\n\nThe listing had broken Amazon's guidelines, I was told, although the exact rule that was broken wasn't clear. The company took others down, too.\n\n\"We have proactive and reactive methods that help us detect content that violates our guidelines, whether AI generated or not. We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed, and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines,\" an Amazon spokesperson said in an email.\n\nBut when I asked for any information about who was behind it, the company didn't provide it.\n\n\"Looking into this for you,\" one staff member said.\n\nI didn't hear back.\n\n'Platforms should bear responsibility'\n\nBut I was lucky.\n\nOthers have struggled to get AI books taken down, sometimes books that aren't just about them, but are attributed to them.\n\nAustralian Society of Authors chief executive Lucy Hayward says this has become so common as to be unremarkable.\n\n\"On the publication day for an author, you'll often see that there's already an AI-generated version of the book that's already been on sale,\" she says.\n\nHayward says there are obvious ways it hurts authors: they lose sales to the fakes, they get poor reviews because someone bought the slop and blamed them, it confuses people trying to buy the book, and they give up.\n\nShe says jobs many authors have done as side hustles, like copywriting, have been particularly impacted by the spread of generative AI, and fraud is contributing to dropping reading rates.\n\nHayward says there are some simple fixes, like requiring platforms like Amazon to effectively police these kinds of derivative works and requiring retailers to label AI-generated content so readers don't get tricked.\n\n\"Platforms should bear responsibility,\" she says.\n\nBut her remedies go further.\n\nHayward says AI companies need to do licensing deals with authors to compensate for the books they've taken and to do more to protect their intellectual property.\n\nThe government has been quietly consulting on two proposed changes to copyright law to facilitate AI training in Australia.\n\nBoth plans would make training opt-out for authors and other creatives, meaning that the burden is on the individual, not the company, to stop their work being used to train AI.\n\nAI companies say an opt-out system is necessary to allow legal AI training in Australia, something that the federal government explicitly says it hopes will happen.\n\nHaywood and other creators think the onus should be on AI companies to secure approval from creatives to use and protect their work\n\nCreatives remain vulnerable\n\nWhen I looked this week, I found dozens more AI-generated books still for sale.\n\nIt's not just on Amazon, either. Other platforms reportedly have similar issues.\n\nI can't see any more ripoffs targeting me. Perhaps I should be offended; if my book was more popular, surely there'd be more imitations.\n\nBut it's telling that of all of the utopian AI futures that we're promised — abundance, the end of disease, happiness — tech executives' blue-sky thinking is still leaving creatives vulnerable.\n\nEven though AI-enabled rip-offs are already happening en masse, authors are hoping there's more that can be done to protect their work in future.\n\nOr, to quote \"Leni McAllister\" quoting \"Cam Wilson\": \"This is not an ending. It's an invitation\".","full_text_attribution":"Full text extracted from the ABC News article at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-10/cam-wilson-ai-book-copyright-laws/107220714. Attribute to ABC News and link to the canonical URL."}