The Slop Refinement of E-Book Scams ⇥ joanwestenberg.com
Scroll through Instagram for a few minutes, and you’ll be swamped by a parade of sponsored posts promising extraordinary wealth through minimal effort: “PDF farming” generating €25,000 monthly, rebranded ebooks yielding “$4230 in a month,” or selling “thousands of books without writing them.”
These aren’t fringe scams hiding in the shadowy corners of the Internet.
They’re algorithmically amplified, professionally produced advertisements popping up in millions of feeds daily.
This appears to be an updated version of an old scam. Previously, as Dan Olson documented, you would scrape together the ingredients of a “book” from various gig economy servant platforms and, theoretically, sell it through Amazon and its “best-kept secret” Audible. This market is, as Westenberg writes, entirely saturated. So why bother paying people or taking any risk whatsoever when you can just generate every component? A.I. makes a get-rich-quick scheme more efficient. But it still will not work.
Cryptocurrency and related topics have been something of a magnet for deceptive behavior, so it’s not surprising to see an Amazon search for “cryptocurrency” bring up a sponsored listing for a book series by an author with a GAN-generated face. Authors with synthetically generated face images have been an issue on Amazon for some time now, and some of them have served up potentially lethal AI-generated culinary advice. In the case of the sponsored cryptocurrency books, the alleged author is one of a group of three authors with GAN-generated faces published by the same alleged publishing company, Tigress Publishing.
I have previously described Amazon as a “low grade flea market mixed with a liquidation store”. That now seems like high praise. In the five years since I wrote that, it has descended to feeling like one is picking through a scrap heap of products confiscated by customs agents for being dangerous, knockoffs, or stolen.