I remember as a young child coming outside of our house and finding that my bike had been stolen. My heart sank. I remember asking myself how anyone could steal a kid's bike. A bike gives a child their first sense of independence and freedom. It expands a child's opportunity to interact with the world and their friends. And as such, children form deep emotional attachments to their bikes, or at least I did. Not only did it give me freedom, but it was also a birthday gift. I wasn't spoiled as a child, and for us, a bicycle was an expensive gift. So I also felt like I had let my parents down.
There is a growing discontent with AI in the writing community. Some authors embrace it while others flat-out reject it. I believe AI is a tool that needs to be used responsibly, be it a baseball bat, social media, a mode of transportation, or even a firearm. But there are those who will take from others to advance themselves. Evil exists in this world, and it lives in the hearts of humanity. And those who are evil will use tools to their own advantage, even with twisted morals.
When Compliance Protocol was published, I was surprised to see another book with the same title on Amazon. It even has an eyeball on the cover. I designed my original book cover with the "all-seeing eye" and was quite surprised to see this.
The book blurb on the back cover is even more surprising with striking similarity to me and my book:
For reference, this is the new cover design for MY book:
It's a little too coincidental...
There are other signs that this is AI theft including the same names as the characters in my book, Elena, and Voss. It's highly likely these authors are using a pen name to mask their true identity.
Until now I was quietly observing how AI was affecting the book market. And now I am a victom of what I've heard other authors are saying, AI companies are using books to train their models and "authors" are writing books from the foundation of real writers.
It's likely the creators of these books aren't even aware of what they've done.
One of these authors, Daniel Moore, has 56 books on Amazon. Traditional authors typically take 6–12 months (or at best 2–3 months for extremely prolific rapid-release indie writers) to outline, write, edit, and publish a single full-length book. Publishing dozens of titles in a compressed timeframe (averaging well over 10–20+ books in a year) is virtually impossible for a single human writer producing original, full-length content without standard generative assistance or bulk content templates.
His first released book was "The Candle Man: The Authors Edition" (nevermind the gramatical error with the word "Authors" which should be "Author's") was published June 28, 2026. There is NO WAY he published 56 books between June 28th and August 1 (today) without AI generating these books. It's not humanly possible.
Amazon limits authors to publishing a very generous three new titles per day. A company that started as a book store should set more realistic paramaters, maybe three books per month, to help discourage this behavior.
It's very discouraging when real authors are trying to break into an already flooded market to find books produced at this rate.
I read that Amazon had over four million books published last year. That's almost 11,000 books every day. I suspect this number will more than double for 2026 with the AI slop that is flooding the market.
Draw your own conclusions. As for me, I'm highly discouraged.
On a positive note, my bicycle was recovered thanks to the local police department and I was even more appreciative to have it afterwards.
Hopefully this book thing I'm doing will have a similar happy ending. The problem is there is no governance preventing these actions.