After former New York Times editor-in-chief Joseph Lelibert passed away last month, his brother Michael Lelibert went online to see how he was being remembered. As expected, he found an obituary in a major news outlet. But he also discovered another unexpected portrait of his younger brother.
Shortly after Lelifeld's death, at least six biographies were published on Amazon. Some of them were available for purchase on the day he died. He said the book said his brother was a chain smoker who trained in Cairo and reported from Vietnam, but none of that was true.
“They're trying to make money off of your grief,” says Michael Lelibert.
Books like this are part of a creepy new publishing subgenre: AI-generated biographies of the recently deceased.
Among the biographies published shortly after Lelifeld's death was “Beyond the Byline: Uncovering the Mind of Joseph Lelifeld: The Man Who Made History.'' According to GPTZero, a program that detects AI-generated text, there's a 97% chance the book was created by an AI.
Tom Smothers from the 1960s TV show “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” was also a recent hit. Mr. Smothers died on December 26, the same day a new book with the awkwardly ungrammatical title “Tom Smothers: Reveals 4 Untold Truths About Half of the Smothers Brothers'' became available on Amazon. Ta.
Country music star Toby Keith also had his biography published posthumously this month. It included an unusual disclaimer: “The author and publisher make no guarantees as to the accuracy or completeness of the content.'' “Any resemblance to a real person is coincidental.”
Some of these books, such as “Chita Rivera: Biography and Memoir of West Side Story Star Chita Rivera,” were available on Kindle Unlimited, which pays authors per page view. Other titles are available in Kindle or paperback versions for a few dollars. For $3.25, customers can purchase his Kindle edition of “TV Legend Norman Lear Biography, Dead at 101: The Biography, Legacy, Achievements, and What You Know of Comedy Legend Norman Lear” You can purchase it. You probably don't know him. ”
Amazon declined to answer questions about sales of these books, but it appears that publishing these books is not a robust business. Few had customer reviews, and some had low ratings. Disappointed readers described one book as a “60-page pamphlet” and another as a “glorified pamphlet” and a “rip-off.”
Even such a small dividend may be worth it, given the ease of producing these books, if the sales volume is high enough. One author named Betty Melton publishes several books a month. Among the recent titles published under that name are biographies of recently deceased celebrities, such as Henry Kissinger and musician Miles Goodwin, and books about people who are still alive, such as football coach Bill Belichick. It contains.
“It's statistically almost impossible that these were written by humans,” said Edward Tian, founder of GPTZero.
Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing guidelines require authors and publishers to tell the company whether their content is AI-generated. Amazon spokeswoman Lindsey Hamilton said the company allows AI-generated books to be sold on its website unless the customer experience is “poor.” When Amazon was alerted to some of the biographies included in this article (which, according to GPTZero, are all very likely AI creations), they removed them.
“We have taken proactive and reactive steps to evaluate content in our store and have removed many titles that violate our guidelines,” Hamilton said.
Amazon said it can't provide contact information for anyone publishing on its site, making it difficult to determine who is producing these books. In many cases, no publisher is listed, and the authors named are fictitious or even dead names taken from the Internet.
Lori M. Graff is listed as the author of many books, including those by Toby Keith and Joseph Lelibert.
But if you search for “Lori M. Graff” on Google, the obituary for a woman who died in 2016 comes up at the top.
