This is actually a spin on an existing git-rich-quick scam (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw). Version 1.0 had people hiring low cost ghostwriters for hundreds of dollars to bang out a book on some SEO topic. Now you use the same playbook with "AI," with far less upfront cost.
I fell for this once when I was a newer developer. I bought a book on my Kindle about Ruby on Rails, thinking it might be more insightful or accessible than the Rails docs. But every chapter was literally just copy/pasted from the Rails docs (which are free).
Like 3/4 of Amazon's listings for classic books are Print on Demand scams that exist to trick people buying books as gifts, who don't know what they're looking at and don't know to watch out for this sort of thing. Just Project Gutenberg text automatically sent to the printer, no manual typesetting or clean-up or any actual care put into it. They're just garbage, literally. Pure waste.
A funny thing that made the rounds on social media over here a few years ago was somebody buying a translated copy of Moby Dick. Turned out it was evidently translated by Google translate or some similar service, and it was atrocious.
Literally the first sentence "Call me Ishmael" was translated as if the meaning was to tell Ishmael to call the story teller on the phone.
It’s a huge shame too because it shouldn’t be that hard for Amazon to filter it out. It’s not like there isn’t a database of these classic works, at least the ~2000 most popular ones that must account for 95+% of searches. If only they had the economic incentive to do so.
