On September 27, several writers published obituaries about writer and photographer Kaleb Horton, who recently died. The obituaries were written by friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, but all of them revered him as a writer and photographer, whose work has appeared in GQ, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and VICE.
Some of these obituary writers were shocked and disgusted to discover an AI-generated “biography” of Kaleb Horton was suddenly for sale on Amazon.
“I cannot overstate how disgusting I find this kind of ‘A.I.’ dog shit in the first place, never mind under these circumstances,” writer Luke O’Neil, who wrote an obituary for Horton, told me in an email. “This predatory slop is understandably upsetting to his family and friends and fans and an affront to his specific life and to life itself. Especially days after his death. All week people have been eulogizing Kaleb as one of the best, although sadly not widely read enough, writers of his generation, and some piece of shit pressed a button and took 30 seconds or whatever it is to set up a tollbooth to divert the many people just learning about him away from his real and vital work. And for what? To make maybe a few dollars? By tricking people? I can't say what I think should happen to thieves like this.”
The book, titled KALEB HORTON: A BIOGRAPHY OF WORDS AND IMAGES: The Life Of A Writer And Photographer From The American West, was published on September 27 as well, is 74 pages long, and has all the familiar signs of the kind of AI-generated books that flood Amazon’s store on a daily basis.
Even at just 74 pages, the book was produced at superhuman speed. That appears to be the normal cadence for the author, Jack C. Cambron, who has no online footprint outside of online bookstores, and who has written dozens of biographies and cookbooks since his career as an author appeared out of thin air earlier in September. He has written biographies about director Cameron Crowe, Fulton County, Georgia district attorney Fani Willis, and pop singer Madison Beer, to name just a few. There’s no consistent pattern to these biographies other than a lot of the people they’re about have been in the news recently.
All these books also have obviously AI-generated covers, which is the most obvious and one of the most insulting signs that Horton’s biography is AI-generated as well: The person on the cover looks nothing like him.
AI-generated books on Amazon are extremely common and often attempt to monetize whatever is happening in the news or that people are searching for at any given time. For example, last year we wrote about a flood of AI-generated books about the journalist Kara Swisher appearing on Amazon leading up to the release of her memoir Burn Book. In theory, someone who might be interested in the book or Swisher might search for her name on Amazon and buy one of those AI-generated books without realizing it’s AI-generated. We’ve seen this same strategy flood public libraries with AI-generated books as well.
"Although many of us online appreciated him and have paid tribute to him as a writer, any real reporting about him—like the kind he did for the figures he obsessed over, and which he would deserve—would reflect that Kaleb was a human being and a complicated guy," Matt Pearce, another journalist who wrote about Horton's passing, told me in an email. "This AI slop is just harvesting the remnants of legacy journalism, insulting the legacies of the dead and intellectually impoverishing the rest of us."
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has said that it does not want these books in its store in response to our story about the AI-generated Kara Swisher books last year, but obviously is not taking any meaningful action to stop them.
“We aim to provide the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience for customers and authors and have content guidelines governing which books may be listed for sale," Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek told me in an email last year. "We do not allow AI-generated content that creates a poor customer experience. We have proactive and reactive measures to evaluate content in our store. We have removed a number of titles that violated our guidelines.”
Update: This post has been updated with comment from Matt Pearce.
