It looks like there are still nearly a dozen obvious AI clones of my kayaking guidebook on Amazon.

Each of them features:

  • an improbable title (often with multiple colons),
  • an author name with a middle initial (many with a misplaced period), - a photo that’s very clearly not the Salt River
  • they’re all much longer than you would expect for a normal guidebook (122-124 pages), except that it mimics the length of my own (I included a lot of additional information and history that few guidebooks would incorporate)
  • they’re all listed at $11.95 or $12.95 paperbacks (mine is a $4.69 ebook).

I give the book away for free on my website if you join the email list for the Alliance of Salt River Paddlers, so it’s pretty obvious how they got the copy to run thru an LLM.

I didn’t write it to make money, and it’s not clear that anyone has actually bought one of the clones. But I still find it annoying. And I wonder how many other small author ebooks are cloned this way.