In the New York Times, journalist Kashmir Hill writes that she recently discovered that there was an AI-generated biography of her available for sale.
A biography of Kashmir Hill — title: “The Biography of Kashmir Hill” — [was released] in August 2025. My life story had a mottled brown cover and a publisher I’d never heard of before.
[…]
My biography is 90 pages long and should be shorter. It combines facts about me that are widely available on the internet, such as where I grew up, with generic insights that could be true of anyone, like a horoscope spread over dozens of pages. “You cannot understand Kashmir Hill without understanding her contradictions,” my biographer wrote, along with an excruciatingly long description of my elaborate coffee-making ritual. (Fact check: My husband does it.)
[…]
I clicked on the author, one John Crane Miller. His bio page described him as a “seasoned biographer and cultural analyst,” and his portrait was a widely used stock photo of a white man in a suit speaking at a conference.
[…]
“The Biography of Kashmir Hill[…]” was one of 10 biographies that Mr. Miller had published in a single week
[…]
[Miller] claimed to have read my childhood diary and spoken with people who know me well “and those who wish they didn’t.”
Hill goes on to interview a different “author” of AI-generated books, Bill Johns, who has published 445 books on Amazon (he sells “a few hundred books per month, each earning him roughly $7”), and to discuss some other general topics around AI-generated books. But the above excerpts are the most relevant bits for my purposes.
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