Apple Books Flooded With AI-Generated Knockoffs of Real Author Works

Joanna Stern launched a book about artificial intelligence and almost immediately found more than 10 fake versions of it listed on Apple Books, using misspelled variations of her name and copycat covers designed to siphon sales from the real release. She documented the situation in a video, contacted Apple, and the company removed the fakes. Then more appeared.

The pattern here is the problem. Removal works once, but the economics of AI-generated content make it trivial to regenerate and resubmit knockoffs faster than any manual review process can catch them. What used to require a team of human ghostwriters now takes minutes and costs almost nothing.

Apple’s response followed the standard playbook: the company pointed to existing policies against misleading content and copyright violations, and noted that it requires disclosure for AI-generated material. Those rules exist. The enforcement, clearly, does not scale.

The broader platform problem

Kara Swisher ran into the same situation on Amazon a couple of years ago and had to contact leadership directly to get her book’s fakes removed. Amazon appears to have improved its detection since then, though Stern still found and purchased two knockoff workbooks tied to her release on that platform before they were taken down. The fact that a journalist with a public profile and direct access to tech company contacts still had to hunt these down manually illustrates how little protection exists for authors without those connections.

Apple has spent years building its digital storefronts around curation and trust, a contrast it frequently draws against more open competitors. The Books platform has never attracted the same scrutiny as the App Store, but the AI tools now flooding publishing with cheap generated content are stress-testing every storefront’s ability to verify what it sells. For now, the burden of policing fakes falls almost entirely on the authors being copied.