This escalating issue blurs the line between genuine authors and AI-produced pseudonyms of non-existent writers.

The Post mentions a publisher that has a multitude of books on Amazon on remarkably specific subjects, buoyed by questionable five-star reviews.

Moreover, AI-created books on Amazon represent only a fragment of the issue, with additional AI-generated content pervading the internet with dubious sources, potentially sparking a widespread misinformation crisis.

A New Paradigm

Alarmingly, these deceptive indications could instigate a vicious cycle, with AI text engines endlessly recycling one another’s content.

NewsGuard, an organization that assesses online news source reliability, spotted 49 websites in just April that seemed to be producing content mostly or entirely generated by AI.

This emerging landscape is something that some of the largest publishing entities are now wrestling with. Some are concealing their use of AI, while others are openly declaring it.

“We have nothing to hide,” says Josh Jaffe, president of San Francisco-based online publisher Ingenio, speaking to the Post. “By utilizing generative AI tools, we’re actually serving people by creating content that otherwise wouldn’t exist.”

Digital platforms like CNET and BuzzFeed are already heavily utilizing this technology to create often suspiciously-sourced and repetitive content.

Even AI-generated images are starting to permeate the internet, with the top Google search result for American artist Edward Hopper this week showing an AI-created imitation.

For authors attempting to market their books online, this is an unsettling new paradigm.

Chris Cowell, a software developer based in Portland, who discovered one of his books had been plagiarized by an AI on Amazon, finds it disconcerting that “whatever text I produce could eventually be ingested by an AI system, sparking even more competition,” he told the Post.

The outcome of these algorithms could cause wide-scale bewilderment — or even worse, pull the ground out from under us.

“The primary concern is the potential loss of a grip on reality,” Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at the AI startup Hugging Face, told the newspaper. “In the absence of a firm foundation, the system can fabricate information. If this same fiction is pervasive globally, how can we trace it back to actuality?”