No living American historian is as prolific as Blake Whiting. In one week alone last fall, he published 13 books on a host of complex archaeological and historical subjects, ranging from the collapse of Near Eastern civilizations in 1177 BCE to the recent discovery of a huge Silk Road–era city in Central Asia.

Amazon sells his hardbacks for $28.99, the paperbacks for $20.99, and the Kindle versions for a bargain $7.99. What you can’t buy from Amazon at any price, however, is Blake Whiting’s CV. Though the books claim to be copyrighted in his name, you won’t find an author picture or bio, nor will you find his website or Instagram. He does not belong to the faculty of any college or university, and he is unknown to those academics he cites in his books—which are not actually copyrighted.

Whiting, as you have guessed, is neither historian nor human. His fake persona is harbinger of an alarming trend threatening disaster to academics and journalists alike.

I know this all too well; I am a science and history author who has published extensively on many of the subjects covered in Whiting’s books. I have written magazine features that have been clearly reshuffled, reorganized, and supplemented with other freely available material to masquerade as the unique work of “Blake Whiting.” This is not plagiarism in the old-fashioned sense, in which a few sentences or paragraphs are lifted from a previously published work. This is word-laundering on a truly industrial scale, aided and abetted by one of the world’s largest corporations. Using AI tools and a pseudonym, unknown culprits are now profiting from my work and that of my colleagues. Worse, they are limiting what we can write about in the future. What publisher wants to publish a second book on an archaeological discovery, no matter how significant?

The volumes by “Blake Whiting” provide sophisticated analyses with up-to-date information, flashy covers, and introductions written in the first person. There is no hint that the author is not human. “I first encountered news of this discovery”—a large settlement recently found in Uzbekistan— “while researching trade networks for an entirely different project,” states the introduction to Archaeology of the Silk Road’s Forgotten Metropolises, “and like many historians, my initial reaction was skepticism.”

That book details the groundbreaking work of Michael Frachetti of Washington University in St. Louis and his colleague, Farhod Maksudov, of Uzbekistan’s Institute of Archaeology in Tashkent. The two men have spent more than a decade excavating remote Central Asian sites that shed fresh light on the medieval network of the Silk Road, and they have published their results in peer-reviewed journals. I have covered their research in Science and Smithsonian, visiting their excavations and interviewing them extensively. When I contacted Frachetti, he was not familiar with “Blake Whiting.” “Never met him,” he said. “I guess someone is making money off us.”

Likewise, Eric Cline, a George Washington University archaeologist and author of the popular 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which was published by Princeton University Press, is unfamiliar with the alleged author behind 1177 BC Revisited, published in November 2025. “Not a single footnote,” Cline notes of the new book. “No bibliography whatsoever. The ‘author’ does mention me in passing in the introduction, but nothing more than that.” Cline calls the work “a complete rip off” that is not plagiarism in the form of cut-and-paste, but a clever reshaping of his own material.

Readers, however, seem unaware that “Blake Whiting” is not a flesh-and-blood author. “Fascinating read!” wrote one Amazon reviewer of a book about the important Turkish archaeological site called Gobekli Tepe. “Well organized chapters, clearly explaining what has been discovered,” wrote another. “Speculations on all aspects are well grounded in real archaeology.” A reviewer on Goodreads gushed: “This was an EXCELLENT overview for the layperson about this site. It was a simple but well-balanced discussion of the site and its possible origins.”

AI projects designed to pose as real researchers, set in motion by unethical humans, with the cooperation of a powerful corporation, are now capable of fooling even careful bibliophiles. This is not the ChatGPT of 2022. “It reads beautifully and is accurate,” Cline says ruefully of 1177 BC Revisited.

The books are not listed in the U.S. Public Records System; works created entirely with AI cannot be copyrighted, since their authors are not human. Each of these books, however, has an Amazon Standard Identification Number. One 206-page volume about a recent high-tech effort to read ancient Roman scrolls that burned two millennia ago is even entitled, apparently without irony, AI Reads the Dead.

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, which prints “Blake Whiting’s” book to order, at a profit, insists that it carefully monitors its catalog. “We invest significant time and resources to enforce these guidelines, using a combination of machine learning, automation, and dedicated teams of human reviewers,” the company states on its website. Yet somehow, Amazon’s “careful monitoring” failed to detect an author with no bio or online presence who published more than a dozen books on a host of subjects within a week. The company claims to limit titles created by one author to 10 per week, a figure that Whiting exceeded without drawing Amazon scrutiny. “We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines, whether AI–generated or not,” Amazon spokesperson Jennie Bryant said. She declined to comment on Whiting’s works.

Amazon is, in essence, allowing the fox into its vast henhouse of authors, and profiting from a business that threatens the very livelihood of its traditional content producers. Of course, U.S. copyright law allows for “fair use” of copyrighted material for commentary or education. “Blake Whiting” goes far beyond this, making use of powerful AI tools to avoid overt plagiarism. Tellingly, the books are devoid of direct quotes, which would mean lifting directly from previously publications—a sure mark of outright theft.

This development has startling implications not just for writers but for young academics struggling to break new ground. If an AI program accesses your just-completed dissertation and salts it with data and text from other sources, then that book you planned to write for a general audience, based on years of research, might be available online before you can get your proposal to a potential publisher.

This sort of cynical piracy has begun to thrive in today’s AI Wild West, a territory largely devoid of government regulations. Though Amazon may take down the offending volumes once it is informed by aggrieved authors like Cline and myself, it faces no consequence for its behavior. Will readers be informed? Will they be fully refunded? What is to prevent the book thieves from tweaking a title, altering the pseudonym, or rephrasing the text and republishing their pirated work?

Of course, legal action is always an option. But to whom do we serve legal papers? The identity or identities of “Blake Whiting” is information Amazon holds as confidential. How do I, as a freelance writer, continually monitor Amazon’s corpus, much less attempt to sue a behemoth that has armies of lawyers? Assembling a class-action suit like the recent one against Anthropic is a more palatable option, but it is also an expensive and time-consuming proposition.

For now, at least, the rapidly changing environment leaves writers like Cline and me in an increasingly grueling race. We are competing not just with other authors but also with smart and polished computer programs used by unknown actors eager to glean a profit from our years of work and who confront few obstacles. Before I can reach my desk with my morning coffee to labor on my next chapter, they can churn out a half-dozen books. “It’s enough to make me want to head for the hills and spend the rest of my days tending sheep or picking daisies,” says Cline.

According to Ernest Hemingway, “there is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” In our brave new world of AI, unless we very soon decide otherwise, such dogged effort won’t be necessary. All you will need is a dash of deceit and avarice, mingled with data, algorithms, and computing power, to fill that blank page.

Andrew Lawler  is a journalist and the author of A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis that Spurred the American Revolution. For more, see andrewlawler.com.