Want to make millions with AI? These books probably won't help.
In which Amazon authors with AI-generated portraits publish low-effort books on learning about and making money with generative AI
The proliferation of generative AI models in recent years has been accompanied by a deluge of low-quality books produced with the aid of generative AI, and subsequently published on Amazon and other platforms. Generative AI itself is a recurring topic of such books, with titles such as “ChatGPT Profits Unleashed: The Art of Making Money with AI Conversations”, “Get Rich With AI”, and “Generative AI Millionaire” promising significant financial rewards simply for reading repetitive books about artificial intelligence. Many of these books have alleged authors with AI-generated portraits, accompanied by hype-laden biographies that in most (but not all) cases likewise appear to be artificially generated.
Searching Amazon for phrases such as “make money with ChatGPT” and “start a business with generative AI” quickly turned up a dozen different authors with AI-generated portraits, and at least one book to their name about using generative AI for business/moneymaking purposes. (This set of authors is not exhaustive, by any means.) Nine of the twelve authors use StyleGAN-generated faces, eight of which show the extremely consistent facial feature positioning associated with this type of artificially generated image. The StyleGAN face used by one of the authors, Russel Grant, has been zoomed significantly in a possible effort to thwart this particular detection method. The remaining three authors use stylized images that were likely created with text-to-image models.
Based on the sample text visible on Amazon, the content of the books leaves a lot to be desired. One book, “ChatGPT Essentials for Beginners (2024): Revolutionize your everyday life and the life of your small business with ChatGPT!”, by alleged author James Gilbert, opens by incorrectly stating that ChatGPT was launched in 2015. (The correct year is 2022.) Other books abound with bizarre turns of phrase such as “Thus, video marketing has risen above traditional boundaries, opening a domain of likelihood that harnesses the full potential of visual storytelling”. Several books are laden with lengthy, repetitive paragraphs that wind up being almost entirely devoid of meaning.
The signs that the supposed authors of these books may not be real are not limited to the use of AI-generated faces. In multiple cases, the name of the author changes depending on where one looks; for instance, the cover of “ChatGPT Profits Unleashed: The Art of Making Money with AI Conversations” lists the author as “Harvey Ford”, but pages within the book use the name “Ford Harvey” instead. Another author’s name varies between “Lucas Evan Bennet” and “Lucan Evan Bennet”, depending on which Amazon screen one happens to be viewing.
The majority of the authors have similarly-worded biographies outlining alleged personal history and achievements, but some of these biographies are highly implausible. For example, author Ethan James Whitfield and his GAN-generated face supposedly led multiple companies to groundbreaking advancements in AI applications in his younger years, among other impressive deeds. Were any of this true, Ethan James Whitfield would likely be a prominent name in technology circles, but the only evidence of his existence is a handful of short e-books about ChatGPT.
Perhaps the strangest biography of the bunch belongs to Ken Pealock, yet another Amazon author with a StyleGAN-generated face. A self-described “writer, documentary producer, former libertarian, and… former prisoner of the war on liberty”, Ken Pealock bizarrely claims to have at one point held power of attorney over “the CIA’s secret bank accounts”. While most of the authors discussed in this analysis have published only a handful of books, Ken Pealock’s Amazon page lists dozens of books published over several years on topics including online content marketing, sex advice, right-wing politics, and potentially hazardous mushroom cultivation techniques. Some of the Ken Pealock books, such as “They Left No Crime Uncommitted” and “Justice Unleashed: The Power of Jury Nullification in Fighting Bad Laws” have sovereign citizen-esque themes.
The strangest thing about Amazon author Ken Pealock: he may actually be real. Despite the StyleGAN-generated face and the spammy content of many of his more recent books, there is evidence that a person named Kenneth Pealock exists, and that this person experienced some of the events chronicled in the sample text of one of the Ken Pealock books, “They Left No Crime Uncommitted”. The book in question describes the author (presumably Pealock) being arrested and charged in federal court along with an associate named Larry Bolin, and eventually being sentenced to a 20 year prison term. These details match a case from the late 1990s in which a pair of individuals by the names of Kenneth Pealock and Larry Bolin were charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and subsequently found guilty. The most likely explanation is that the GAN-faced Amazon author Ken Pealock and the convict Kenneth Pealock are the same person, and that he embraced spammy publishing as an occupation after being released from prison.
