The curious case of Tigress Publishing
Sponsored listings on Amazon are going just great
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.
The image used by the alleged author of the “Crypto Essentials” book series, “Scott Jenkins”, contains several artifacts indicating its artificial origin, including irregularities in the teeth and asymmetrical eyeglasses with differently-sized arms on each side of the face. While many authors of financial advice books provide information about their education and work history, the biography supplied by “Scott Jenkins” is strangely general, and gives no indication as to the author’s actual area of expertise beyond “climbing the corporate ladder”. It would not be surprising if the biography were generated using a large language model, and some publicly available detection tools flag it as AI-generated, but in the absence of a larger amount of text or overt glitches it is impossible to be absolutely certain.
The sample portion of “Crypto Essentials Book One: Understanding the Fundamentals of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology” by GAN-faced author “Scott Jenkins” is interesting in several ways. For one, there are multiple odd uses of the word “key”:
“After reading this book you are key to continue your education…”
“And if you are key keen to stay connected...”
The cause of these errors is not immediately clear, although if the content is AI-generated, it is possible that the “key to continue” error is the result of the prevalence of phrases like “press any key to continue” in training data. Other explanations, such as incorrect transcription of voice dictation or plain old typos, are also possible.
The sample pages also contain a section encouraging the reader to leave positive reviews of the book on Amazon. Toward the end of the introduction is an email address, which leads to the website of the alleged publishing company responsible for this and the other “Scott Jenkins” books.
All three of the “Crypto Essentials” books by “Scott Jenkins” are listed on the website of Tigress Publishing, an alleged publisher of nonfiction books that appears to have sprung up sometime in the latter half of 2024. This publishing company publishes books by three different “authors” with GAN-generated faces. (A fourth author uses a photo of unknown origin.) All of their books are listed on Amazon, along with a few other online marketplaces.
The other two Tigress Publishing authors with GAN-generated faces are “Morgan Reid”, whose sole published work is titled “The Balanced Life Blueprint: Discover the 12 Sectors of Wellbeing to Relieve Stress and Restore Balance in Mind, Body and Soul”, and “Susan Jeffries”, responsible for multiple tomes on gardening. The gardening books are laden with colorful photographs of various plants, but these delicious vegetables are unlikely to have been grown by “Susan Jeffries”, as the photographs are plagiarized, and many have been circulating on the internet for years. Much like “Scott Jenkins”, both “Morgan Reid” and “Susan Jeffries” have oddly nonspecific biographies.
As with the “Scott Jenkins” image, the GAN-generated faces used by “Morgan Reid” and “Susan Jeffries” contain multiple anomalies hinting at their artificial origin. These include the bizarre chunk of surreal fabric in the lower right corner of the “Morgan Reid” image, and a portion of a secondary head (known colloquially as a “side demon”) on the right edge of the “Susan Jeffries” image. All three images also exhibit the unusually consistent facial feature placement found in StyleGAN-generated faces. This anomaly becomes particularly apparent when multiple such faces are blended together, as in the composite image below.
