OverDrive is the company that provides a lot of digital content to libraries. If you’ve borrowed an ebook or an audiobook in Libby, or read a magazine in Kanopy, that’s OverDrive.
It seems there is some AI weirdness with audiobook narration on OverDrive, and the narrator is only part of the story.
On Monday, October 14, librarian Robin Bradford posted on Bluesky that she’d purchased an AI audiobook for her library system and she was really upset about it:
Over 100 titles by AI “narrators” were in their catalog, and Robin was having trouble finding indications that the authors themselves are real?
Interesting.
Not only is that A LOT of audiobooks, but similar to my casual foray into contemporary romance cover art, I noticed that there was a odd pattern to those author names:
- Mostly one or two syllable first names
- One syllable last names
- All very basic nouns and adjectives as surnames
That homogeneity is a little strange, right? Good thing I’m really nosy.
I reached out to Robin for an interview to learn more. What had brought this to her attention? What was her next step? While we were corresponding, we both searched names and author websites for more information.
This is really weird, y’all.
Her investigation started when she received a message from a patron of her library system that there was something wrong with an audiobook they had borrowed.
The patron reported that during a quiet part of the audio, there seemed to be a tiny portion of another recording inserted into the silence. It happened more than a few times and the patron also provided a timestamp, because this patron is very awesome.
Robin says that this isn’t unusual, and the process is pretty routine: “It’s usually just a corrupted file transfer or something. And we contact the publisher and let them know, or let OverDrive know, and it gets re-uploaded.”
So then what happened?
Robin: “So I went to look up the specific book to see who the publisher was. Mostly because I wanted to know. We would contact OverDrive about the error, and they would fix, or talk to the publisher directly.”
Digital files get corrupted often enough, so this isn’t alarming. But then, Robin and her coworkers noticed the name of the narrator: “Scarlett Synthesized Voice.”
Scarlett, I noticed, is pretty busy: their books appear in Everand, and Audiobooks.com, as well as Chirpbooks and Libro.fm.
Even more intriguing: all the books featuring this narrator are very similar in appearance, and all of them were authored by one of the names Robin noted earlier.
In other words, the authors Robin mentioned were all using AI/synthesized voice narrators.
Here’s a screenshot from Libro.fm’s search results:
These results are similar to what Robin saw within her own library’s OverDrive. When she searched for just the terms “synthesized voice” she found over 100 books, as she mentioned on BlueSky.
Let’s take a look at the books themselves for a second:
Look at the similarity in format and style across all these authors. All He Verbs. So Adjective. The Unseen Noun. Not to mention the repeated silhouette, the outer glow, likely courtesy of Photoshop. VERY consistent imagery, right?
All these authors with different names and different series, with similar cover formats, styles, and the same audiobook narrator, who isn’t real?
Huh.
Back to my conversation with Robin. Robin hadn’t initially noticed it was an AI narrator because she never pays attention to the narrator when there’s a patron report of a problem with an audiobook: “It’s always file problems, not narrator problems.”
“And it’s probably still not a narrator problem. It could have happened to any file. BUT, it sent me down the rabbit hole of ‘oh shit, I bought an AI narrated book?’
“I wonder how many of those I bought on accident.”
“OH SHIT, we have HOW MANY?”
Hello and greetings from the depth of the rabbit hole that swallowed us both.
I noticed, as did Robin, that there is no publisher listed that we could find. I pointed out the similarities in the cover art, style, genre, and names, which made me wonder if the author(s) are AI, too.
“That is where I am right now,” Robin replied. “And I’m shocked because I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that Blake Pierce was a real person.”
As she said earlier in her thread on BlueSky, “I go to the book author’s webpage it is….incredibly bare. I wonder if the whole thing is AI now. Books, audiobooks, everything.”
We started googling the authors and the results are very similar: websites that are mostly pages listing the books in a series, sparse bios that follow the same format of listing what series the author has written, and very, very few with social media outside of a Facebook group Page (thank you Desdemona for the correction), and none of the social media accounts are linked from the author websites.
Let’s take another look at that list of names:
- Blake Pierce – website is all series lists, no social media linked, but does have a Facebook page
- Kate Bold – website is all series lists, no social media aside from a Facebook
grouppage, which isn’t linked that I could find. - Molly Black – website is all series lists, same template as Kate Bold, no social media
- Fiona Grace – website is all series lists, same template, no social media links
- Rylie Dark – website is all series lists, same template, no social media linked,
but I found a Twitter account, a Twitch account, and an OnlyFans** - Ava Strong – website is all series lists, no social media links
- Jack Mars – website is all series lists, no social media links
- Taylor Stark– website is all series lists, same template as Bold, no social media links
- Mia Gold – website is all series lists, same template, no social media
- Laura Rise – website is all series lists, same template, no social media, newsletter link broken
- Audrey Shine – website is all series lists, same template, no social media, Facebook page found via google, not via link on site. Audrey does have a profile at CozyMystery.com
- Sophie Love – website is all series lists, no social media linked
- Ella Swift – website is all series lists, no social media linked
- Vin Strong – website is all series lists, same template, no social media linked
- Katie Rush – website is all series lists, same template, no social media linked.
** Thank you to Dario in the comments who found a digital footprint for Rylie Dark going back to 2019, and who is likely a separate person from the “author” Rylie Dark, who, per Dario, first appeared in 2021.
The lack of social media linked from the author website is really sending me: what author who isn’t a Massive Major Name eschews social media?!
I want to go back to Blake for a second: when I image searched “Blake Pierce author” this result caught my attention.
The Babelio page is in French, but features that image.
And Glasses Blake shows up when I searched for Molly Black as a “related person:”
When I used a reverse-image search for that image of Glasses Blake, I honestly thought I’d get a stock image site.
No, I got a Fresh Fiction interview with an author named Tyrell Johnson? Who is, and has been confirmed, a real person with real humanity and everything?
Johnson, author of Wolves of Winter, also uses this photo on Audible and Amazon. His book was reviewed in the NYT with another photo at the top – same person, I think. He also has an active Twitter account. His book, The Lost Kings, was narrated by living human Saskia Maarleveld (their narration is excellent).
Why is Tyrell Johnson’s author photo being used for Blake Pierce? No idea.
I tried to reach out to Tyrell Johnson, but the website listed on their Facebook page, tyrelljohnsonauthor.com, loads to a Penguin Random House page for their book with no contact options. I’ve reached out via Facebook but haven’t heard back.
Deep in that rabbit hole, Robin and I kept googling Blake Pierce. And I had to sit back in my chair and recognize for a moment that, alongside Robin, I was researching whether these authors were real people. What a tremendously bizarre use of our time!
We were not the first to ask this question: on Reddit in r/books, four years ago someone asked the same question:
Who is Blake Pierce? And the collective ghost writer theory.
I was presented to the works of one named Blake Pierce, a murder/mystery author that carries a baggage of hundreds of books published, with multiple series with different protagonists running simultaneously. And for such a huge number of books, Blake Pierce keeps the quality high (for mostly free books that you can get for Amazon Kindle).
After searching the web for some information about the author I ran into something weird: nothing. Not a photo, nor a biography.
The abysmal number of books published, the lack of information about the author and the overall not-charging brought up the idea of a collective ghost writer situation where a number of different writers join together and publish books using the same author name to facilitate it’s distribution – such as in the fringe theory that Shakespeare was not one, but multiple writers joining ideas and hands to create masterworks.
SO, anyone of you ever heard about such a thing for real as in collective ghost writers? And do YOU know anything about BLAKE PIERCE?
Have a good one.
The commenters searched copyright.gov and found that “the copyright claimant is Noah Lukeman from Larchmont New York. Lukeman seems to be a literary agent based in NY. Maybe using new authors to write the series??”
Another commenter said, “Apparently a woman. Supposedly wrote the first book in 2015. I’m going to go with a collective of writers.”
A year ago, another person updated: “Here we are now 3 years later. by the end of 2023. Blake Pierce will have written 244 books. He /She is writing 61 books just in 2023 for release.”
Two months ago, a user noted that there were no print editions of Blake Pierce books in any Barnes & Noble:
This thread is interesting. I am only now reading it as I noticed something odd last weekend. I went to our local, ginormous Barnes and Noble store to search for some books by Blake Pierce. I have purchased several in the Apple books store, but have always preferred to actually hold a book versus reading my phone. I looked at the shelves and didn’t see one book by Blake Pierce. I thought that was weird considering, as many have mentioned, the number of books out under the author.
And anyone reading a book by Pierce from Apple would see the many, many pages before the Table of Contents in these books highlighting the bazillions of books by this author.
I showed the lady at B&N all the books listed and she, too, thought it odd I hadn’t found any. So she searched.
And of all the B&N stores in our city and a few surrounding towns, there was not ONE STORE that contained even one of Pierce’s books.
There were a few that could be purchased online, but even then nowhere near the amount written. We tried to look at the books and maybe come up with a different name under which they may have been published but came up empty handed.
Is this weird to anyone else? Sorry to be commenting on such an old post, but I saw someone comment in 2023, and as mentioned I just started reading these books lately. Thanks for your time and have a great day!
How many books has Blake Pierce published as of right now? According to GoodReads:
SEVEN. HUNDRED. AND. ONE. books. Again, with very similar, repetitive cover art for each series:
Repeating a cover motif? Totally normal, I agree. But Seven Hundred Books? No interviews, promotional posts, or social media that I could find? That’s very strange. The Reddit “collective of authors” theory makes some sense.
Robin noted that the publisher on the Blake Pierce titles are attributed to Lukeman Literary, but there’s no mention of Pierce or any of the other authors on the Lukeman website.
Back to my conversation with Robin, where we were sending each other links and using a lot of exclamation points.
Robin: “OverDrive has 1,234 (that number, tho) audiobooks with a synthesized voice. It’s not an insignificant amount.”
When I shared with her my discovery of Tyrell Johnson’s interview with Fresh Fiction and the image used by Blake Pierce, she replied,
“Okay but look at that. He’s answering questions, it’s an interview, THIS is something I would use to verify humanity.”
“I’m not trying to verify identity. I don’t care if HelenKay Dimon and Darby Kane are the same person. I care if they ARE HUMAN. And an interview would be one of the ways I would try and verify that. Are there things in the world where they have answered questions.”
(Please note that I got really excited when I found an interview with Blake Pierce on the Central Illinois Business Podcast, but it’s likely a different person with the same name. Woe.)
I think there are a number of issues here, starting with the presence and proliferation of AI narrators. Audiobook narrators (the human ones) are already fighting against use of AI in their profession.
And I don’t want to listen to an AI narrator, personally. I’m glad they’re marked “Synthesized Voice” but that’s relying on librarians or consumers to notice.
But this particular situation seems weird beyond the question of the narrator. Not only did Robin and I spend time trying to identify why so many books by authors with similar names used an AI narrator, but then we spent time trying to figure out if all the authors themselves were human. And in a lot of cases, we aren’t sure if we know the answer.
Librarians already have to educate themselves about new books when there are hundreds per day, if those books are even accessible to libraries (KU books are not, for example). Now there’s research time for “Is this a human?” Egads.
The library system had already spent money on licensing these books for the library system, but Robin was not planning to buy more. However, some of the titles had hold lists, and usually a book with a hold list will be re-purchased if the license is expired.
I searched to see if the library system had a policy or guidelines about AI narration or AI writing for items in circulation, and presently they do not. My attempts to research library AI policies generally mostly yielded results about using AI for patron experience, such as this statement from the Holderness Free Library in New Hampshire.
Nick Tanzi at The Digital Librarian has written about AI policy and the need for it, but again it’s mostly focused on patron interaction and AI tools for librarians and patrons, not AI-written or AI-narrated materials in circulation. The Massachusetts Library system offers a list of resources regarding issues surrounding AI, but again, no circulation policy that I found. And the University of North Texas (go Mean Green) has resources from the federal government and others about AI, but again, not a circulation policy.
I imagine policies about AI narration and AI authorship are in development, if the question has been brought up. As I said to Robin, there’s going to have to be a meeting, possibly a committee, and definitely a task force. Or all three.
The presence of AI audiobook narration in a library catalog, and the possibility of AI-authored books in circulation, is a policy question that I don’t think has an answer yet, but is one that requires attention.
I want to know whether the person who wrote the book I’m reading is a human, or a conglomeration of networked machine knowledge using an abhorrent amount of electricity and water, per the UN, among other environmental effects. I don’t want to read AI-written books, and I don’t want to listen to AI-narrated audio, and the burden of research to determine both is on me, an individual. On a library system level, that amount of oversight seems impossible.
I reached out to OverDrive to ask if they had a policy or guideline regarding AI audiobook narration, and Jan Leitman, Chief Marketing Officer, responded, saying:
OverDrive does not exclude AI narrated content from the catalog. Where synthetic/AI narration is used, we request that this information is included by supplying publishers in the metadata.
So it’s not a requirement, but it is a request that metadata entries include mention of AI narrators.
When I asked where in the metadata fields this information is commonly replied, Ms. Leitman confirmed that it’s “typically found in the Narrator Name field.”
I’ve reached out to Noah Lukeman for comment and to request contact information for the mysterious Blake Pierce and haven’t heard back.
Does your library have a policy about AI narration or AI-written books in circulation?
Have you encountered AI audiobook narration?
ETA 11:30am ET: Pete Milan a writer and audiobook narrator, shared that he’d “looked into this awhile back; you can go to the US Copyright Office website and it’ll tell you if the text was generated by AI. For instance, one of Rylie Dark’s latest:”
Here’s a screenshot:
“Text generated by AI.”
ETA 12:00pm : Julia on Bluesky replied that they’d gone down the Lukeman Literary rabbit hold a few months ago, “when I mistakenly bought a Molly Black book thinking it was a self-published book. …Lukeman Literary works with Eleven Labs on the audiobooks.”
Update 22 October 3:25pmET
CozyMystery.com, linked above, replied on BlueSky:
Hooray for having a policy! Thanks, CozyMystery.com!
@hapax – Another, practical harm is that they clog up the digital shelves and make it hard to find quality content when browsing. They’re like junk mail or email spam and are hard to weed out.
Since we’re being asked, I bought an Edgar Allen Poe compilation off Audible about a year ago and within 5 minutes suspected it was synth–my first one! I immediately returned it because ugh. That’s a massive nope. Haven’t encountered another but I check the voice actors now.
I have used ElevenLabs Reader to listen to e-books I own, because I prefer listening to documents in audio. In fact, I would recommend this app to you @SBSarah because of the audio quality, and I think it is a good app for listening to e-books. However, the difference here is that these are documents I have, and I’m not accessing ai versions of books. I think the fact that ElevenLabs, a company I otherwise like is doing this, is crossing a line, but I’m not really surprised either. I hope all this makes sense.
I am an author (a human author who does not use generative AI for anything) and this is legitimately appalling and also horrifying.
Also, one of the Fiona Grace titles is “Vanilla Vendetta,” but the cover clearly says “Vanilla Vandetta,” which suggests that no human being ever looked at it before posting…
I can attest (for whatever it’s worth) that Jack Mars is a real person/s because I started reading him before LLMs were a thing. However, I don’t doubt the narrator of the audiobook is AI.
Very interesting! As to the collective ghost writer thing, the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series were/are both written this way. Those are the only examples I can think of, though. There’s a really interesting “biography” of “Carolyn Keene” (Nancy Drew’s author) called Girl Sleuth, that talks a lot about the system and the main people behind it.
Blake Pierce is listed as the pseudonym of Noah Lukeman on his very first book, published in 2015– Once Gone (a Riley Paige Mystery–Book #1), as well as a few others in the catalog.
Wow. This is bananas. Kudos to you and Robin for going down this very deep rabbit hole, Sarah. How are actual human authors supposed to compete with these AI content farms and the sheer volume of their output? Discoverability is hard enough for the average self-published/indie writer. It’s so demoralizing.
My question is: how sure are we that the holds and requests for “Blake Pierce” are real? If someone is using generative AI to churn out slop books, they could very easily be spamming library requests to make money.
Well, this sounds to me like a Cobalt Fairy situation.
If you didn’t know, Cobalt Fairy (and Starfall Publications and probably some other names) have been doing this in historical romance for some time, but they aren’t silly enough to have one author with 700 books. They have a ‘stable’ of several dozen author names all of whom release a book a month. Dude behind it is a Greek guy called Manos Petrolinos. Brags about his ghostwriter empire.
They’ve actually stolen plots and even covers and titles wholesale from legit authors, and regularly come out with new author names almost identical to real author names.
There’s a Youtube channel with all-AI narrated audiobooks too.
Manos knows who I am so I’m posting this under a pseud because I don’t want my covers and titles nicked next, but if you want more info you’re welcome to contact me.
100% agree that AI generated text is abominable, and AI narration being sold mixed in with live-narrated audiobooks is immoral. AND I think it bears bringing to the discussion the consideration that text to speech apps are an important accessibility aid. Narration is best by live narrators. But not everything has an audiobook version, and using this technology to read research papers, textbooks, etc with my ears is incredibly helpful for me, a person who learns best taking information in with multiple senses (and whose reading vision is increasingly worse as I age), as well as those who are blind or low vision. Like @Stefmagura I have used AI readers for documents I own/accessed through my academic institution, as well as have rented textbooks in ebook form which include digitally generated narration.
I guess as a consumer I need to do more research into the narration apps I use, and now I worry that many (if not all) are engaged in these practices…
Wild speculation ahead:
I wonder, with the sheer volume of books, and the fact they’re being requested by real people, whether the first dozen or so were real, then it switched to a republishing churn with new covers and a bit of find and replace on character names and locations (rewrite the first chapter so the preview looks like a new book) and then moved on to feeding early books into AI to generate new ones. It’s hard to imagine with the lengthy process they accidentally shared about how much work goes into generating a whole AI book (going off track every 100 words, as they point out) that they could produce more than a book a week with AI alone and keep them interesting enough that people want to read more than one, but asking AI to do the find and replace work would be much less labour intensive for “Blake”.
I’m not saying that this is the same thing, but I’ve been beset by ads on Youtube for “the best way to make money on Amazon”, and they all seem to be about getting an AI to write a book for you, then another AI reads it, and you upload the file and then sit back and collect the money.
I detest this.
Looking at the twitter page linked for Rylie Dark, I see no indication that the twitter-Rylie (who appears to be a real person with a variety of memes and interests) is the same as book-Rylie. I skimmed her media tab and saw no book covers or promotion, there’s no link back to the book website in her bio, or mention of an agent/publisher (like what my sister, a real human writer, has in her twitter bio). So I suspect book-Rylie is simply the website, and the rest of those links are an unrelated person with the same name.
Librarians all over should contact Overdrive and request (demand) that they add a filter to search fields that would allow us to not be shown AI and synthesized voice content. I plan to do that today.
Thank you for this article. As an interesting sidenote Blake Pierce, Fiona Grace and Morgan Rice is all translated to swedish. Which… doesn’t make sense since translations are expensive and Swedish is a small language. It especially doesn’t make sense for a fantasy author to translate their books. Crime and suspense authors? Yes. Crime and suspense is popular here. Fantasy? Not so much.
If they are using software to translate the books, a lot would make sense, though.
@Julie, Johansson has already dealt with being courted by OpenAI to mimic her voice, and even after turning them down, they had a voice that sounded suspiciously like her.
They titled the voice “Sky” but now I’m really curious is “Scarlett Synthesized Voice” sounds anything like ScarJo.
Thankfully, I checked my library’s libby collection, and found not a single audiobook narrated by a someone marked as a Synthesized Voice. They appear in the search filling in from what you type (11 different ‘Name (synthesized voice)’ are in the search ‘did you mean this?’ list), but searching finds nothing.
I’ve heard examples of AI narrated fiction, but while they are much better than in the past, they are still all pretty flat in their expression. The sort of narrator that puts you to sleep, or just just get distracted and suddently realized you stopped listening ages ago.
@Gillian B: As a minor, though probably related, digression — I came across an article the other day on how to generate passive income for your small business without a large investment. Number 1 was write an ebook. If you google passive income, that seems to be one of the top recommendations. As if writing a book is easy, or profitable, though I suppose it can be if you use AI to do it all for you.
Addendum to my last: In addition to Blake Pierce, a few of the other authors listed also show as being pseudonyms of Noah Lukeman. There are a few comments in some of the titles that state the original entry was false and listed the wrong person, but one would think, after filing *that* many entries, they’d not make that many mistakes.
And random clicks through the book entries showed a LOT of AI written material.
@Nialla: I wondered the same thing, and listened to a sample. The Scarlett Synthesized is a much higher voice than ScarJo.
Also, that blew my mind, that they’d ask to use her voice, she’d say no, and they’d make a clone of her. That woman sued Disney. You think she’s afraid of you? Come on, y’all.
Wow. This hits home. As a budding voice over artist I signed a contract with Lukeman and narrated 6 books for “Kate Bold”. I hoped I was receiving unfinished copies due the amount of errors I would find and correct in my narration. Now, I’m not perfect, but I definitely would believe you if you said the books were written by AI. And after 6 books and over a year working with them, I was replaced with a synthesized voice for the final book of the series. No email, nothing. And this was after I was told they’d be contacting me for the final book soon. Heartbreaking to someone trying to break into the industry and trying to learn and grow as a narrator. So, yeah. I’m actually happy to see them being found out!
@LBC: OH YIKES, that’s really terrible. I’m so sorry that happened!
This is an article from July’s “Philadelphia Magazine”. The writer, Jason Sheehan, searches for the…
(NON-SPOILER ALERT)
non-existent bestselling author of a multitude of appliance device cookbooks, sold only on…
(#2 NON-SPOILER ALERT)… yes, you guessed it: A**z*n.
To skip to the part where Jason speaks to an actual human at A**z*n, to find out what their official policy on AI-generated books is, scroll down to the “Customer Service” heading.
(Tl;dr: Why yes, they DO have a “policy” [rolling eyes emoji])
https://www.phillymag.com/foobooz/2024/07/27/ai-cookbook-author/
PS – Put the article into “Reader” mode so that the ad volume doesn’t hurt your brain.
I’ve updated the post with images of my replies on BlueSky from CozyMystery.com, who have shared additional information and removed some of these authors from their database, as their policy is not to include AI titles.
This is an amazing read! I just checked our consortium’s catalog and there are 155 entries for Blake Pierce authored works and 105 of those are Spanish language edition eBooks. 13 Russian language and the rest in English – not one physical book. They all fall into the cover patterns and “Verb Me” “So Adjective” titles.
I think the vague feeling of “surely I’ve seen works by this author before” is an intentionally-created thing on the part of whoever is in charge of churning out all of these books. One of my favorite authors is *Holly* Black, and I do not think the name similarity between Holly Black and “Molly Black” is accidental. I think it could be very possible that some of these pseudonyms these books are being released under are intentionally created to sound similar to or even rip off the names of actual human authors publishing books they actually wrote.
@Penny What I didn’t say in this thread, but have mentioned before under my first and last name here, is that I am blind, and I would agree we find these apps to be helpful, not only for textbooks and research papers, but for anything that just doesn’t have an audio book version. While everyone would, in a perfect world, learn to read Braille, not everyone has, and they still want to take in the information which is in books, whether it is through reading or listening.
Oh, hell on toast. Thank you very much for bringing this up – now I have something else to be a pain in my system’s collective rear about. At least we still *have* selectors I can be a pain toward – sorry in advance, y’all!
About the soul-crushing enterprise that was (I assume generative AI upended it) modern ghostwriting, I think that Folding Ideas video about “contrepreneurs” is a good window into that world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw (especially part 3, wherein he writes a book)
Also, after checking the links about Rylie Dark (Rylie Knox?) I suspect that’s just a case of homonyminity (just like for the Blake Pierce “Central Illinois Business” interview). They had been using ghostwriters (and then AI) for years, under pseudonimity. There’s no reason to believe that it would’ve been any different for Rylie Dark, unless that was one of the very first initiatives.
But the ghostwrited Rylie Dark appeared at the end of 2021: https://web.archive.org/web/20211201000000*/https://ryliedark.com/
compared to the real/human Rylie Dark, which has social media footprints since 2019/2020 (Twitter account created in 2014), and doesn’t appear to have any link to these efforts.
and compared to the ghostwrited Blake Pierce, which appears to have been active since 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160308171450/https://blakepierceauthor.com/
@Dario: Thank you for this info! I’ve updated the post to reflect that additional context.
It’s also interesting to see how invested some reviewers seem to be in the books “written” by Molly Black on Goodreads. And the author blurb stating that she is “an avid reader (…) [and she] loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit [author website] to learn more and stay in touch.” Nothing says avid reader quite like an LLM/AI scavenging other texts to “write” something new.
Famously, the Warriors feral cat books over at Harper Collins are collectively written by ghostwriters hired to work on that project by the publisher. They created a collective Author name, but each specializes in certain cats, I guess, and writes the bits from their POV. They are UP FRONT about this on their website and there are photos of the group of ghostwriters. But they were assembled to fill a marketing niche discovered by the publishing company and the publishers own the copyrights.
This “agent” is clearly doing the same thing using AI on the downlow. Have you considered sharing this with the American Library Association and Author Beware?
In response to Lisa D: I have an MLIS and have worked in public libraries for 32 years. The Dewey Decimal System is chock full of racism, so switching to a system that is subject based is preferable, IMO. We use the BISAC model and organize our nonfiction by subject, making it very easy for librarians and patrons alike to find books on any topic.
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Just so folks are aware, there are other AI voices used by Lukeman Literary, including Amelia, Annie, Caroline, Elias (German), Emilia (German), Gabriella, Giulia (Italian), Hades, Jack, Kiel (used only for Blake Pierce’s Agent Zero series), Laura, Leonie (German), Liam, Linda (Italian), Mademoiselle (French), Mady (Spanish), Maevys (French), Marissa, Marko (German), Olivia, Teresa, Valería (Spanish), Victoria, and Vivienne. Some of the voices also seem to do other languages–Caroline was doing a lot of heavy lifting for them in early 2023.
@Katie: This is like the worst list of hurricane names. Holy cow that’s a LOT.
Wow! I used to be a collections librarian (now I’m an accidental systems librarian) and this blew me away! I’m sharing with our head of collections. I did a search of our over 100 library consortium catalog to see what came up and found 1,252 titles. However, only six in Libby (mostly older works that are in the public domain). The rest were in Hoopla. Some were clearly marked in the title as being read by a synthesized voice, but most you would have to look at the extended record to find this information.
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