--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King.
--:-- [Sound effects: A book opening]
--:-- Noel King: Your dad's favorite author, Eric Larson, has a new page turner. It's about the Civil War, and it's gotten a lot of press. Lincoln did something that I think politically was quite brilliant. As with other Larson books like The Devil in the White City or Thunderstruck, the title's campy and it's kind of random. The Demon of Unrest. It's almost as if there is this demon afoot in the land, and sometimes, frankly, it's a little hard to understand exactly why. What does that have to do with the Civil... Never mind. Point is, your dad isn't going to remember that title when he goes to buy the book on Kindle. He's probably just going to search for Eric Larson. And up will pop what you might call Eric Larson books. Titles such as Eric Larson Biography, Eric Larson Biography Book, and Eric Larson, The Biography of a Storyteller, all published in the first five months of this year. What is going on?
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--:-- Noel King: Coming up on Today Explained, a man, a plan, a scam, AI, and why your Kindle is full of garbage.
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--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from the FIFA World Cup of all things. The FIFA World Cup 26 is coming to North America next summer. It is the ultimate celebration of sports and culture. You can get closer to the beautiful game with a hospitality package, closer to the action, the best seats, the best suites, closer to match day and that world-class food and that world-class entertainment, closer to the experience of a lifetime. Book a hospitality package at fifaworldcup.com slash hospitality. Use code VOX20 for 20% off. Must be 21 and over. This product may cause intoxication. This product has not been evaluated or approved by the FDA. This product may contain up to 0.3% THC.
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--:-- Noel King: You're listening to Today Explained. Constance, go ahead. Give me your full name and tell me what you do.
--:-- Constance Grady: My name's Constance Grady. I'm a senior correspondent covering culture for VOX.
--:-- Noel King: Have you heard that our colleague Kara Swisher wrote a book?
--:-- Constance Grady: I have heard. It's been the talk of the town. I actually read it. I really like it. It's a very good book. It's also a book that has a staggering amount of buzz.
--:-- Noel King: In your piece, you write about this weird thing that happened with Kara's book. What went on exactly?
--:-- Constance Grady: Yeah. So around the same time that the book comes out, a bunch of other books with kind of similar titles start to show up on the Kindle store. You go to look up Kara Swisher, and there's 20 AI biographies written by me that aren't me, that are pictures of me, very femmy pictures of me.
--:-- Noel King: You go look for them. They're all kind of dancing around the phrase Kara Swisher book, kind of the same way that a lot of stores that exist now are named things like Plumbing Near Me. So they show up if you're searching for a plumber near you.
--:-- Constance Grady: So you're seeing titles like Kara Swisher book, How She Became Silicon Valley's Most Influential Journalist. That's not even interesting. And then this one, I feel like maybe someone spilled coffee on their computer. Kara Swisher, Silicon Valley's Bulldog, and Kara Swisher biography, Unraveling the Life and Legacy. Text Queen Bee with a sting, which I'm like, okay.
--:-- Noel King: A lot of books that are not actually by Kara Swisher, But if you're just kind of quickly searching Kara Swisher books so you can click on your first result and get the book that you want to read, there's something that looks close enough that if you're in a hurry, you kind of might click them by accident.
--:-- Constance Grady: So on this AI thing, I did. I wrote the CEO of Amazon. I'm like, what up, dude? And they're like, oh, we're going to take them down for you. And I'm like, I'm not talking about me. What about everybody else?
--:-- Noel King: That is great for her if she can get it. That's probably not the case. if this is happening with other authors.
--:-- Constance Grady: So here's what's happening. The phrase Kara Swisher book is trending on the Kindle storefront and keyword scrapers that exist to find trending search terms are delivering the phrase Kara Swisher book to what we might call garbage book generators.
--:-- Noel King: So these will be people who use a combination of AI and very, very cheap ghostwriters to generate as quickly and cheaply as possible a series of books that they can plausibly title under something that includes whatever keyword is trending and get very distracted people to sort of accidentally buy them.
--:-- Constance Grady: And that's how they make their money.
--:-- Noel King: What does it look like when these books, the trash books pop up?
--:-- Constance Grady: So the trash book is going to have a plausible enough title that if you're reading quickly, it'll look like what you're looking for. It'll have kind of a cheap and weird looking cover, a lot of clip art and really shoddy Photoshop kind of smashed together. Often the cover is AI generated.
--:-- Noel King: But if you're just looking fast, it's all designed to be just good enough to get past any first sensors that you might have up.
--:-- Constance Grady: The cost is going to be way lower than the cost of the actual book. And a lot of times price is one of the only metrics that people are scanning. So if you're just looking for the cheapest possible way to get the book you want, this is a book that you can very easily end up clicking on without looking all that closely.
--:-- Noel King: You click buy book and it shows up on your Kindle and it might take you a few pages to realize, wait, this is not the book by Kara Swisher that I wanted to read. This is a series of biographical claims about Kara Swisher and I'm not sure that's actually true what they're saying about her.
--:-- Constance Grady: Kara Swisher is a power of nature in the realm of tech newscasting. So there are a few tells that you will get that this is not the book you're looking for. One is just that the narrator might be different, right? Kara Spisher writes her book in the first person. She is the person telling you this story. The biography is her third person.
--:-- Noel King: For the north of 20 years, she's been Silicon Valley's most sharp writer, exposing the ascent and fall of realms.
--:-- Constance Grady: But there are also some tells that will show up in text that is generated by an AI or by a large language model So one is that it tends to follow a pretty classic like kind of five paragraph essay format Sort of each sentence will have a topic sentence and then sort of three supporting ideas, which leads cleanly to the next.
--:-- Noel King: You'll sort of feel like you're reading a pretty okay eighth grade essay.
--:-- Constance Grady: Swisher has barbecued everybody from Elon Musk and imprint Zuckerberg to Sheryl Sandberg and Kim Kardashian, separating admissions, revealing contentions, and igniting basic discussions about the effect of innovation on our lives.
--:-- Noel King: And you'll also start to notice that a lot of the things that it's very confidently asserting to you don't necessarily match up with your understanding of the way the world actually works.
--:-- Constance Grady: You'll start to notice It's the misinformation that AI has become known for. And this happens with audiobook versions, too.
--:-- Noel King: Thus, jump into the universe of Kara Swisher and get ready to be tested, informed, and engaged. You will love it.
--:-- Constance Grady: The interesting thing here is the numbers, right? So Kara writes one book and then like three or four titles spring up around her one book.
--:-- Noel King: Do we have a sense of how often this is happening? And does it happen with every big book, every book that gets buzz?
--:-- Constance Grady: This is something that we're seeing more and more with the release of particularly buzzy books that are really taking off on Amazon, that their keywords are trending.
--:-- Noel King: And it's something that we have seen become more common as generative AI gets cheaper and easier to use and more widely distributed.
--:-- Constance Grady: So it's come to my attention that all of these biographies about me have shown up on Amazon, I think today, which is really an exciting day for me because I'm not just releasing one book. This is the real book, my book that I wrote. I'm releasing like nine books.
--:-- Noel King: I tried a lot of things when I was reporting this story to figure out if there was a way to quantify the number of these garbage books that are coming out.
--:-- Constance Grady: I talked to the authors, Guild. I talked to a bunch of different authors. It seems as though the only people in a position to quantify the amount of these books that are coming out is Amazon itself.
--:-- Noel King: And it is really not in Amazon's best interest to tell anyone how many of these books there are.
--:-- Constance Grady: What does this mean for consumers other than, you know, you really need to make sure that you have the real title?
--:-- Noel King: It means that buying a book becomes kind of walking through a field of landmines. You have to figure out what you're looking at and be really careful and make sure that you're not just throwing your money at a kind of book-shaped digital file that doesn't have anything inside it.
--:-- Constance Grady: It also means that we have to be really, really careful with what we're reading because there are kind of literal dangers that are also in place here.
--:-- Noel King: I spoke to a man who worked for the New York Mycology Society. So this is about foraging for mushrooms. He had been finding all of these AI-generated foraging books on Amazon.
--:-- Constance Grady: Most of them had the exact same title. The Forager's Harvest Bible. What's worse, if you try to look up just The Forager's Harvest, which, by the way, is the real book, you still get inundated by these other titles.
--:-- Noel King: They were also full of misinformation. They showed mushrooms that didn't exist, mushrooms that looked like real mushrooms, but weren't really there.
--:-- Constance Grady: He was incredibly worried because he said, if you have even the slightest bit of wrong information about a wild mushroom that you're picking to eat, that can literally mean life or death.
--:-- Noel King: Which was so striking to me because it shows that, you know, the worst case scenario with a garbage ebook is you could literally die from it. that's not great.
--:-- Constance Grady: And what about Jeff Bezos? No, I'm kidding. What about Amazon? What about the people who are like supposed to be in charge of the Kindle marketplace?
--:-- Noel King: Have they cracked down on this at all?
--:-- Constance Grady: Kindle has done a number of things in order to try to make it more difficult for you to publish these garbage books. They have started to require that if you're publishing something on Kindle Direct Publishing, you have to say whether or not your content is AI generated.
--:-- Noel King: There's only so many titles that you can publish in a day which can prevent people from just churning them out and churning them out and churning them out through AI generating machines.
--:-- Constance Grady: On the other hand, I have talked to people who found that Kindle is very reticent to take down garbage books after complaints from authors who feel that it's infringing on their IP, especially if those authors aren't, you know, well-connected Karis Fisher, which also makes a certain amount of sense, right?
--:-- Noel King: Because Amazon does not have an incentive to take down a file that is selling well on their site. That is money that Amazon can use.
--:-- Constance Grady: They do have an incentive to try to keep this user-friendly and to the extent that the Kindle store becomes so choked with garbage that users stop being interested in using it, that becomes a big problem for them.
--:-- Noel King: Who is behind all of the garbage books?
--:-- Constance Grady: So this is what I went digging to find out. And I found something kind of incredible.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Noel King: Support for today's show comes from Adio.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Noel King: Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Constance Grady: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Noel King: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Constance Grady: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Noel King: And they say you can build AI automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes so that you can focus on what matters building your company.
--:-- Constance Grady: You can join industry leaders such as flat file replicate modal and so much more.
--:-- Noel King: You can go to adio.com slash today explained to get 15 off your first year.
--:-- Constance Grady: That's attio.com slash today explained
--:-- Noel King: We'll see you next time.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Noel King: Visit sierra.ai to learn more.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from Upwork.
--:-- Constance Grady: If you run a business, you know that scaling your business requires the right expertise at the right time.
--:-- Noel King: I sometimes wonder how many of you are running businesses out there.
--:-- Constance Grady: I would love to know. Please email me, noelle at king.com.
--:-- Noel King: With Upwork, you can find specialized freelancers in IT, web development, AI, design, admin support, marketing, and more experts who they say are ready to help you take your business to the next level.
--:-- Constance Grady: With more than two decades of experience, Upwork has a simple and ambitious goal to pioneer a better way of working.
--:-- Noel King: Companies at every stage turn to Upwork to get things done and find more flexibility in the way they staff key projects and initiatives by accessing a global marketplace full of top talent.
--:-- Constance Grady: Plus, Upwork makes posting your job easy with no cost to join.
--:-- Noel King: You can register, browse freelancer profiles, get help drafting a job post, or even book a consultation.
--:-- Constance Grady: You can visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free.
--:-- Noel King: That is Upwork.com to post your job for free and connect with top talents ready to help your business grow.
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--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. We're back with Constance Grady, senior culture correspondent for Vox.
--:-- Constance Grady: Okay, so Constance, you went into the seedy underbelly of how trash books get in the Kindle marketplace. Who are the people doing this?
--:-- Noel King: So this is really, really interesting once you get into it.
--:-- Constance Grady: There's a lot of characters in this story. one of the first characters that I want to introduce you to is a man who goes by big luca also sometimes luca de stephanie hi this is big luca everybody and it's a quarter past five here in dubai and i just woke up and i'm having a cup of coffee and i'm ready to work
--:-- Noel King: According to the legend he is the one who holds the world record for making the most money using kindle publishing in a single day.
--:-- Constance Grady: How do you actually go from zero to more than $8,000 a month in three months? How did you do it?
--:-- Noel King: And so I've gathered all my strategies in this package.
--:-- Constance Grady: Big Luca is one of the first teachers of the garbage book grift, who really makes it big.
--:-- Noel King: And the thing that sets his class apart from all the other classes in this ecosystem is that he gives his students access to a secret Facebook group where they can arrange to buy five-star reviews that will push their garbage books up Amazon's algorithm.
--:-- Constance Grady: Eventually, one of the people who takes Big Luca's class is a man named Christian Mickelson.
--:-- Noel King: He apparently found the class by Googling the phrase, how to make money online.
--:-- Constance Grady: He's a college student. He publishes an e-book titled How to Be a 4.0 Student in College Like Me at Big Luca's Self-Publishing Revolution.
--:-- Noel King: And apparently it does well enough that he pulls in his twin brother, Rasmus.
--:-- Constance Grady: And they start going to town. They are publishing trash book after trash book. They're about things like tantric sex. They're about keto. They're about crystals. They're about all of these kind of trashy, fad-y keywords, anything that they can kind of tram into a title that will attract someone's attention, that someone somewhere is reliably searching for.
--:-- Noel King: They come up with this innovation, which is they run their manuscripts through Google Translate, and then they just sell the result as a foreign language edition.
--:-- Constance Grady: This bumps their income into six figures. It is also the thing that eventually gets Amazon to block their publishing account.
--:-- Noel King: Okay, all right. What's up, everybody? Welcome to our channel. We are the Mickelson twins. My name is Christian. My name is Vespas.
--:-- Constance Grady: So they start their classes after Amazon blocks their publishing account. They're like, we can't sell these guides to keto, tantric, crystal sex anymore. we're going to start teaching other people how to do this instead.
--:-- Noel King: Welcome to this YouTube video where I'm going to be talking about how you can make $100,000 in one single day from your publishing business.
--:-- Constance Grady: What they advertise is they say that they will give you access to keyword scrapers so you know what kind of book to write.
--:-- Noel King: So with these, you do not need to narrate anything yourself. You do not need to write anything yourself. You do not need to design any cover yourself.
--:-- Constance Grady: You do next to nothing when it comes to- They will show you how to use AI to generate an outline and then you either use AI to generate a draft or they'll send it to a ghostwriter who will write the draft for you.
--:-- Noel King: The ghostwriting company, they work with charges less than one cent per word.
--:-- Constance Grady: It works out to $500 for a 30,000 word book.
--:-- Noel King: We've worked out an exclusive deal with our favorite ghostwriting company to provide you with the lowest ghostwriting prices humanly possible.
--:-- Constance Grady: It's the same deal normally only we can get because we're friends with the CEO.
--:-- Noel King: They say they'll promise how to introduce you to audiobook narrators who you can haggle down to a $20 flat fee.
--:-- Constance Grady: They'll show you how to get those five-star ratings on Amazon.
--:-- Noel King: They'll kind of give you everything you need in order to just rake in this passive income goal.
--:-- Constance Grady: In other words, someone else does the work, but we get paid. That's how the whole model works.
--:-- Noel King: According to the people who I talked to who actually took this class, though, really what happens is you pay your $2,000 to get into the class, and then you get a bunch of one calls with someone who called a coach who kind of just tells you oh you actually have to be taking the class to get access to any of this stuff
--:-- Constance Grady: And if you really want to be successful, you'll, quote unquote, invest in yourself and take the $8,000 class.
--:-- Noel King: And that's how you'll really get to passive income in the end.
--:-- Constance Grady: I personally decided to go through this process that they're talking about in which they sent me an email with a link to their free video.
--:-- Noel King: And then they ask for money in order to learn how they do this so-called simple thing.
--:-- Constance Grady: Here it is, ladies and gentlemen. Name any Burger King, McDonald's, Walmart job that actually have you pay it to get hired.
--:-- Noel King: And again, the people who've taken the Mickelson's classes, they're told, your name will not be on this, but don't worry about it.
--:-- Constance Grady: You'll be making money. Yes, that's right.
--:-- Noel King: The people who take this class are told they're going to produce a book. They don't have to write it.
--:-- Constance Grady: They will not put their name on it, but they should be proud that they've made a book and they should be proud because they are going to get rich from it.
--:-- Noel King: Or I should say, they don't guarantee that you'll get wealthy from it, but they say there is a possibility that you can.
--:-- Constance Grady: And then they show a lot of screencaps of some of their students who have been successful in order to illustrate just how successful you could maybe be.
--:-- Noel King: Every bit of this is something I would fall for in a slightly different light.
--:-- Constance Grady: It's so convincing. I watched the sales pitch they have, and about halfway through, I was like hypnotized.
--:-- Noel King: I was like, am I stupid for never having done this? Like, is this the key to a successful life?
--:-- Constance Grady: How could I not have seen it before? It's sort of shockingly easy to fall into the trap of thinking that this is actually a good idea, even when you know, first of all, that it's unethical, and second of all, that it's really not likely to actually work.
--:-- Noel King: And it does, so it does raise this bigger question, which is all the spammy garbage books. Is this just a phenomenon of Big Luca and the Mickelsons, or did other people pick up on it and they're like, no, no, no, we're jumping in too?
--:-- Constance Grady: Absolutely other people have picked up on this.
--:-- Noel King: There is a whole ecosystem of people who have run this grift and turned to the teaching grift and kept going.
--:-- Constance Grady: What I think is really striking about the Mickelson twins is they are not very interested in hiding what they're doing.
--:-- Noel King: They kind of operate in plain sight.
--:-- Constance Grady: That makes it easier to see how this all works economically speaking.
--:-- Noel King: I think it also makes it easier to see what the appeal is emotionally for the people who are doing it.
--:-- Constance Grady: You can kind of feel the tug of this idea that maybe it could actually be this easy and you could publish a book and be super rich and you don't even have to write it.
--:-- Noel King: Yeah, I get that. I get that.
--:-- Constance Grady: Yeah, this is clearly a grift.
--:-- Noel King: You've said it a bunch of times, but is it illegal?
--:-- Constance Grady: What Christian and Rasmus are doing, as far as I can tell, is not illegal.
--:-- Noel King: A lot of it is unethical. A lot of it is against Amazon's terms of service.
--:-- Constance Grady: So things like buying reviews, that's something that if they can catch you, they'll kick you off their site.
--:-- Noel King: But none of it is really, you know, something that you can go to jail for.
--:-- Constance Grady: So we're going to see more of this, almost certainly, right?
--:-- Noel King: If nobody's going to jail.
--:-- Constance Grady: Yeah, there are not that many incentives to not do it if it's something that you're into.
--:-- Noel King: One of the things that really strikes me about this and kind of feels like a little bit of the tragedy of it to me is that what this script does is exploit the part of us in our culture that thinks of books as valuable things, right?
--:-- Constance Grady: It exploits this belief that books are really meaningful and writing a book is something to strive for and that reading a book is a good thing to do that will enrich your life.
--:-- Noel King: And in every case that it intersects with those ideas, it replaces a book that is real and is of some amount of value to you with just this book-shaped digital file filled with nonsense and misinformation.
--:-- Constance Grady: And I think that's really what we all stand to lose when this grift goes on.
--:-- Noel King: That was Vox's Constance Grady.
--:-- Constance Grady: Kara Swisher's book, by the way, is called Burn Book. It's in stores now.
--:-- Noel King: Amanda Llewellyn produced today's show and Amina El-Sadi edited it.
--:-- Constance Grady: Rob Byers engineered and Laura Bullard fact-checked.
--:-- Noel King: The rest of our team includes Avishai Artsy, Victoria Chamberlain, Hadi Muwagdi, Halima Shah, Miles Bryan, Peter Ballin and Rosen.
--:-- Constance Grady: Welcome, Peter. Denise Guerra, Patrick Boyd, Andrea Kristen's daughter. Welcome, Andrea.
--:-- Noel King: my co-host Sean Ramos from Matthew Collette and executive producer Miranda Kennedy.
--:-- Constance Grady: We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder.
--:-- Noel King: Today Explained is distributed by WNYC.
--:-- Constance Grady: The show is a part of Vox, which is totally free, thanks in part to contributions from listeners like you.
--:-- Noel King: Join us at Vox.com slash give.
--:-- [Theme music starts playing]
--:-- Noel King: Which gives your members more ways to get on, stay on, and manage their meds.
--:-- Constance Grady: And that helps your business control your costs, because healthier members are better for business.
--:-- Noel King: Go to cmk.co.access to learn more about helping your members stay adherent.
--:-- [Theme music continues]
--:-- Noel King: Support for the show comes from Mercury.
--:-- Constance Grady: What if banking did more? Because to you, it's more than an invoice. It's your hard work becoming revenue. It's more than a wire. It's payroll for your team. It's more than a deposit. It's landing your fundraise.
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--:-- Constance Grady: Mercury, banking that does more.
