Amazon is selling hundreds of seemingly AI-generated biographies for children

The multibillion dollar children’s book industry is a juicy target for passive income side hustlers, with several claiming they make tens of thousands of dollars selling books for kids written by ChatGPT.

Over the past week, Indicator found 517 nonfiction children’s books on Amazon* that appear to be partially or fully AI-generated. The books contain glaring front cover errors, are written by prolific but mysterious authors with synthetic profile pictures, and often get inauthentic or extremely negative reviews. 

Biographies of notable people are a popular niche in this field. The books I found appear to take inspiration from series like Little People, Big Dreams and Who Was?, which have sold millions of copies globally. Famous people come with a built-in brand and their notoriety means chatbots have plenty of biographic content to regurgitate.

Amazon earns royalties and ad revenue from the books I identified; it also literally prints some of them through Kindle Direct Publishing.

I shared the list of books I suspect of being AI-generated with the company, which said it would review them and would act on any that violated its content guidelines. At the time of publication, 198 books had been removed.

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