How MoS writers fell sufferer to sham showbiz memoirs produced by AI

Three of Britain’s biggest booksellers have removed fake showbiz memoirs written by artificial intelligence bots after being alerted to the scam by The Mail on Sunday.

The bogus biographies, which were being sold online by Amazon, Waterstones and Foyles, were listed alongside legitimate books despite being littered with bizarre claims and outright lies about a wide range of public figures.

They are part of a cynical mass industry, in which software plunders genuine biographies and unreliable internet content to create poorly-written summaries designed to cash in on hoodwinked readers. Many feature AI-generated images on the cover, which often bear little resemblance to the intended celebrity subject.

Earlier this year, the MoS revealed how fake biographies purporting to contain revelations about the King’s cancer treatment were being sold by Amazon, despite being generated by computer. Other slim paperbacks appeared containing lurid claims about the Princess of Wales and the late Princess Diana.

Two of the latest targets are Mail columnist Andrew Pierce and comedian and author Jenny Eclair, who both found fake biographies for sale by an ‘author’ called Yahia Belkherouf.

On discovering the rival memoir for sale last week, days ahead of the publication of her own book, an outraged Ms Eclair urged fans: ‘Please don’t buy this, it’s an AI scam. Jeeese!’

And Mr Pierce says the books about him were ‘garbage’ and ‘littered with errors’.

After being alerted to the AI-generated content, Waterstones, which also owns Foyles, last night deleted all books by one AI ‘author’ on its websites. Amazon also removed the specific titles about Andrew Pierce and Jenny Eclair.

‘Bot’ authors have become more prolific in recent months. While some fake titles suddenly appear just weeks before a real memoir is due to be published others, sinisterly, emerge within hours of a celebrity’s death.

Comedians Rob Beckett, Bob Mortimer and Romesh Ranga­nathan have all recently found themselves victims of the scam.

Former BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones’s memoir Ruskin Park, was also plundered by AI, and Amazon’s algorithm even emailed him to suggest he buy the fake title. He said he was ‘mystified’ by the business model as it was hard enough to get people to buy real memoirs.

One of the most active fake authors is Yahia Belkherouf, who has no public profile but has seemingly published 147 titles on Amazon this year on subjects as diverse as former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, Elizabeth I’s spymaster Robert Cecil and Melania Trump.

Amazon permits AI-generated books unless they create a ‘poor user experience’ or infringe its guidelines. Anyone can self-publish on its website, although a rule introduced in July means authors or publishers taking this route may have to verify their identity.

Meanwhile, such titles were able to be sold by Waterstones and Foyles because their websites are populated via an ‘automated feed’.

Confirming it had removed all Belkherouf’s books, Waterstones said: ‘We go to great lengths to exclude AI-generated titles. Inevitably, some escape this scrutiny and these are removed as soon as they are noticed.’

Amazon said it had ‘a robust set of methods that help us proactively detect content that violates our guidelines’ and books which did not adhere were removed.

That cover picture of ‘me’ doesn’t even look like a distant relative

by Jenny Eclair 

Having spent over 40 years in showbusiness being mistaken for actress Su Pollard, I am used to people being confused about who I am and what I’ve done (clue: not Hi-de-Hi!).

Next month, my autobiography Jokes, Jokes, Jokes, typed by my own chubby hands, will be published. Huzzah.

Only someone has beaten me to it. On July 7, Jenny Eclair: The Biography, written by someone called Yahia Belkherouf, became available on Amazon. There is a photograph of ‘me’ on the front cover looking like a cross between a Stepford Wife and someone who’s been to the same cosmetic surgeon as Nicole Kidman.

Fake ‘me’ is insanely well-groomed, with a perfectly coiffed silver barnet, black narrow-framed glasses, a very taught jawline and suspiciously gum-coloured teeth. 

She looks like the kind of woman you’d see on an advert for a fancy cruise: sixty-something but trim, a slimline, white-trouser type who would stand on the deck with a similarly well-preserved vintage gent, smiling and pointing at the sunset. She is so definitely not me that it would be hilarious if it wasn’t so grimly sinister.

The paperback, retailing on Amazon for £12.48, insists that my life is ‘a tapestry woven with wit, resilience and a touch of the unexpected’ – which sounds to me like Roald Dahl has been making a cushion cover.

In the blurb for this bonkers work of phoney fiction they have managed to nick a few facts from my Wikipedia page, so that my date and place of birth are both correct, but the rest is vague and reads like it has been badly translated from another language.

So far, there is a single ‘one star’ review which, even though the book has nothing to do with me, made me blush. Liz T. says: ‘I was bought this as a gift. It’s utter rubbish. The cover isn’t even a photo of Jenny Eclair. The book is very, very repetitive. Was it written by AI? Or someone doing their GCSEs? Seems to have used Wikipedia for research as it’s poorly researched. Utter rubbish.’

Poor Liz. Having been alerted to this bogus biog, I very quickly put a disclaimer up on X, formerly Twitter, complete with a photo of the fraudulent front cover.

Within minutes, the one-star Amazon reviewer Liz T. got in touch to say that her well-meaning (but not an Eclair fan) husband had bought it by mistake.

When I was first made aware of this scam, I felt slightly sick, though I was cheered by a message from TV’s Sewing Bee’s Paddy Grant, who reassured me: ‘You’re no one if you don’t have one of these weird fakey AI biographies.’ His version apparently took 15 minutes to read, according to one disgruntled reviewer.

Other biographies ‘written’ by the same author include Peter Kay, Kylie Minogue, Gillian Anderson and, most hilariously, Bob Mortimer, whose cover photo looks like some random bloke from a really bad Bob Mortimer police ID line-up.

So at least we’re all in this together and there’s nothing any of us, or our publishers, can do because Amazon allows for ‘independently published’ books to be sold freely on its site.

So, buyer beware – if the photo on the front cover doesn’t even look like a distant relative of the supposed ‘celebrity’, steer clear.

As for the horrified Liz T., whose husband wasted £12.48 on a bot biog, I’ve arranged for a genuine copy of my autobiography to be sent, just as soon as they’re available (October 3, by the way).

Utter tosh with a host of awful errors

by Andrew Pierce

As a journalist of more than 40 years, I was fully expecting some hostile reviews of my first book.

There were a few, of course, but happily outweighed by positive ones. But I never anticipated it would spawn a bogus biography cashing in on the success of Finding Margaret, my story as an adopted child of the emotional search for my birth mother.

Shockingly, the AI-generated book, crassly titled Andrew Pierce Biography: How He Finally Found His Birth Mother, Margaret After Four Decades, written – or not as the case may be – by someone given the name John Justin is littered with errors from the very first line of the badly written 69 pages.

As an avid reader of biographies about people from actor David Niven to Dame Joan Collins, I love the way they are full of amusing, charming and waspish anecdotes from named friends, relations, and lovers past and present.

But not one person is quoted on or off the record in Andrew Pierce: Biography – or two companion books, created by computer, which I have just discovered: Andrew Pierce: The Biography by AP Press (£11 from Amazon) and From News To Documents: The Andrew Pierce Biography by Brittany Hicks (£9.41 from Amazon).

How I laughed when I read about my upbringing in Bristol ‘would have had an impact on the formation of my world view’. Unlikely. I was in Bristol for only five weeks as a baby before being taken to an orphanage 50 miles away in Cheltenham.

Any readers of this AI tosh would also be told that I gained my ‘analytical skills’ and ‘perspective on societal issues’ while studying English Literature at Warwick University. If only. I never went to university and have been to Warwick only once, when shadowing Prince Andrew years ago, while working as a royal correspondent.

For a long time, I feared that AI would mean ageing journalists such as myself being phased out by automatons. But, reassuringly, these books are bot-manufactured recycled garbage.

Thankfully, not all human jobs are yet threatened by AI. I was wrong. If only I had learnt some ‘analytical skills’ at university!