Swisher looked at the screen and saw a book claiming to be a new biography of her, with an image on the cover that she immediately pegged as an AI-generated fake. While the book promised the inside story of Swisher’s life, the author was someone she’d never heard of. A closer look suggested that the book itself might be largely or entirely AI-generated, substituting generic descriptions of Swisher for factual details or anecdotes. Swisher was irritated but brushed it off, she said.
But when she looked at Amazon again this week, she saw spammy clone biographies of her had proliferated, as the tech blog 404 Media first reported. Each bore a slightly different title, author, and fake image of her on its cover. “There were dozens and dozens,” Swisher said. “I was like, ‘What is happening here, and why aren’t they stopping it?’”
For a brief period of time this month, I started to wonder whether I was the only female essayist in America who was not either getting or considering a divorce.
Sex, lies and podcasts converge in Amy Tintera’s “Listen for the Lie,” an edgy mystery that artfully blends our growing obsession with the true-crime genre and our ongoing predilection for murder, mayhem and quirky detectives in fiction.
Hortis, an attorney whose previous book chronicled organized crime, covers this material with workmanlike efficiency and a keen eye for courtroom theatrics. As quaint as some of the story’s details may seem, its themes feel remarkably contemporary: We still rush to judgment, resort to stereotyping and fall for all kinds of propaganda. If the narrative takes some time to get going, the reader is rewarded by the increasingly bonkers trials and their fallout. And it’s impossible to argue with the book’s thesis: “Tabloid justice would, one way or another, alter American law.”