A recent article in The Atlantic ran under the blunt headline, The End of Reading Is Here . According to the piece, research from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) found that fewer than 50% of American adults read even a single book in 2022, and only 38% read a novel or short story. At the same time, the U.S. book market keeps breaking its own publishing records year after year: in 2025, for instance, the number of new titles topped four million — up a third from 2024. A huge chunk of that, 3.5 million titles, came from self-publishing, and one of its most powerful engines is Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). My theory on this mismatch in trends: nobody’s reading books anymore because everyone’s too busy writing them. Joking aside, if there’s still a reader left out there, they’ve probably already guessed where I’m going with this: the all-powerful AI. Not long ago, a New York Times tech journalist was startled to find her own biography on Amazon — and one quick look confirmed it had been written by AI. Digging deeper into the world of AI book publishing, she stumbled onto the work of an extraordinarily prolific retired cybersecurity consultant. What happened next — and where to find reliable information in the age of AI — is what this post is about. Backstory: how a journalist chased the White Rabbit and fell down the hole Let’s start from the beginning. In the summer of 2026, New York Times tech journalist, Kashmir Hill, learned from an acquaintance that a biography about her had been published on Amazon a year earlier. It was titled The Biography of Kashmir Hill: The New York Times Technology Journalist Who Exposed Clearview AI, Challenged Big Tech and Redefined Privacy in the Digital Age . And she was more than stunned since nobody had ever reached out to her, or to anyone she knew, to research the book. “Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it…” The author of record was one John Crane Miller, and the photo on his Amazon page turned out to be a generic stock image of a white man: the kind that shows up all over the internet. Hill couldn’t find a shred of personal detail or contact information for him. But digging deeper into his Amazon profile turned up something else: in a single week in the summer of 2025, he had published biographies not just of Hill, but of nine other American journalists. Even the most trusting reader would find it hard to believe a literary genius could produce this kind of staggering output without a little robotic help. The AI-generated biography of journalist Kashmir Hill, which she stumbled across by accident on Amazon. Source And yet the hardcover of Kashmir Hill’s biography cost a full US$26.99 — despite running to just 90 pages. After reading it, Hill learned a whole slew of “facts” about herself she’d never known — including a detailed description of her coffee-making ritual (which, as the journalist notes, is actually her husband’s duty). Mr. Miller even claimed in the text to have read Kashmir Hill’s childhood diary. “…burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.” Hill had no luck tracking down the author of her biography. She left a comment on the book’s Amazon page asking him to get in touch. Nobody wrote back — and not long after, every book under John Crane Miller’s profile vanished. But that gave her a lead on several other AI authors on Amazon. In particular, she came across a certain Bill Johns, whose author page listed a staggering 445 books . Not expecting much to come of it, she asked Johns if he’d be willing to do an interview — and was more than a little surprised when he agreed. It was probably right around then that Kashmir Hill’s investigation turned into a genuine trip down the AI rabbit hole… “In another moment down went Alice after it, neve…

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