The Rise of Parasite Authors

First, AI stole their books. Now it’s stealing their readers.

Earlier this summer, Tamra Westberry received a Facebook notification that made her heart sink. A fellow author had taken to social media to endorse Westberry’s latest book, Project Erebus, after reading about it in a weekly roundup of the latest paranormal-romance releases. Independent authors like Westberry, who is based in Texas and has published dozens of books under the pen name Tara West, usually welcome an encouraging word and a bit of cross-promotion. But Westberry was dismayed. She had never heard of a book called Project Erebus. And she certainly wasn’t its author.

She looked up her author profile on Amazon, and there it was: Project Erebus, a book that featured character names she’d previously used, with a cover echoing that of her recent work. Translations were available in German, French, Italian, and Spanish. The book was a complete mystery to her, but after she read its sample pages, she suspected it was made by someone who’d used AI tools. (I ran the book’s cover and promotional blurb through Pangram, which suggested that they were completely AI-generated.)

Westberry emailed Amazon and requested that the company delink the unaffiliated books from her profile. Amazon removed the books from the platform within a week or so—but not before some of her fans purchased them, read them, and left reviews. “No real detail, characters remain undeveloped. I almost felt I was reading an essay written by a school child,” one disappointed reader wrote in a two-star review for Project Erebus on Goodreads, a literary social network owned by Amazon that had also attributed the book to West.

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