AI book scammers are still thriving on Amazon’s marketplace.
Just a day after a new book about the AI industry’s race to build a powerful artificial general intelligence hit the shelves, its author Kevin Roose discovered that a scammer was already trying to trick his readers — by using AI.
On Amazon, an apparent machine-generated duplicate of the book, titled “The AGI Chronicles,” is freely circulating on the platform and even showing up right beneath the real deal in the e-commerce giant’s search results.
It looks a lot like the real thing, but is listed for a bargain $24.69 compared to the original book’s $30.00 — something that’s clearly intended to fool unsuspecting customers who are looking to save a few bucks.
“First result: real book. Second result: AI lookalike by ‘K. Rose,’” Roose, a former New York Times tech columnist, fumed in a tweet, posting a screenshot of the scam. “Embarrassing!”
Long after @kashhill and others flagged this problem, Amazon is still getting gamed by print-on-demand slop publishers. This is what the search results for The AGI Chronicles look like. First result: real book. Second result: AI lookalike by “K. Rose.” Embarrassing! pic.twitter.com/o2Il95yU7X
— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) October 7, 2026
Ironically, the cover of the AI-generated dupe removed some of the mangled title text that was deliberately imitating AI hallucinations in the original.
It seems like the scam might be working too. Though the copycat boasts no reviews, Amazon lists it as the “#1 New Release” in the category of “Human-Computer Interaction.” The third best-selling book in this category, according to the website, is the Kindle Edition of Roose’s book.
These schemes have long plagued the platform, and despite years of reporting on the issue, little has been done to stop it. Some AI fabrications claim to be the biography of an author or other public figure — including, in a notable recent example, the NYT tech journalist Kashmir Hill. In an even more irony-laden case, Cory Doctorow’s book on “Enshittification” was instantly AI-duplicated on the day of its release.
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