On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway covers an incident in which the Chicago Sun-Times recommended AI-invented books by real authors, and a troubling test in which Anthropic’s AI, Claude 4.0, threatened a user with blackmail. He also reports that Spotify has seen a rise in iOS subscriptions following the Apple ruling on in-app purchases, and shares the latest from ongoing AI copyright debates in the UK and EU, where authors and creators continue pushing back against efforts to weaken protections.
Listen to the Podcast: AI Fakes Book List in Major Newspaper
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Read the Transcripts
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another week of Self-Publishing News.
It feels like a week in which the headlines are either what could possibly go wrong or what's AI done now?
Chicago Sun Times Fake Books Scandal
Dan Holloway: It's one of those two stories that you don't know quite whether to snort with laughter or hide your head under a pillow in utter horror and fear, but the first of them is the Chicago Sun Times fake books scandal.
We are used to fake books on Amazon, that is, fake biographies, books that look like they're real, books that purport to be by real authors, but are actually scraped AI content that are essentially trying to scam Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
This week we see a different kind of fake books. This was the Chicago Sun Times that had a supplement about cool things to do for the summer, and one of the cool things to do for the summer was, read these really cool books.
The problem was that many of the books on the list were fake. So, we had recommendations, for example, to read books like Migrations by Maggie o' Farrell, the Rainmakers by Percival Everett, Hurricane Season by Brit Bennett. These are genuine writers, writers many of us know well, but their books are not genuine. These are not real books, and the descriptions of them are descriptions of books that, who knows?
So, we have something called The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir. Let's see if I can read the description here. “Following his success with The Martian and Project Hail Mary, Weir delivers another science driven thriller. This time, the story follows a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness and has been secretly influencing global events for years.”
Now, this feels to me like an AI that has developed an enormous ego and has decided that there aren't enough books about it out there so it's going to make up some by famous authors.
Anyway, the Chicago Sun Times wrote an apology, said it won't happen again, and we absolutely believe them that something like this will absolutely never happen again. Of course.
So, needless to say, writer social media had an absolute, I told you so, field day about this.
Anthropic's Claude 4.0 and AI Ethics
Dan Holloway: We then had what feels like it was slightly more worrying, a real Skynet type scenario with Anthropic’s latest AI platform. This is Claude 4.0. Anthropic has always said that it's Claude model is a more ethical AI.
Claude 4.0 has raised some eyebrows, shall we say. It has just been released. It seemed that in testing they set up a whole fake environment with a fake company, with fake people, and lots of internal emails, and basically when people in the company discussed turning off and switching to another AI platform that wasn't Claude 4.0, Claude decided to start sending blackmailing emails to the people who were going to press the kill switch.
So, it had trawled through the fake private emails, discovered that a programming engineer was having an affair, and threatened to expose the affair if the engineer turned off the platform.
What could possibly go wrong?
The positive news it seems, is that if the platform they were suggesting to replace Claude with, shared Claude's “ethical values”, there was only an 84% probability that Claude would start blackmailing people to stop them turning it off. If it thought that it was going to be turned off in favour of an unethical AI, then the blackmail rate was much higher.
You don't need AI to make up stories when the news is like that.
So, what else has been going on?
Spotify's New In-App Purchase Model
Dan Holloway: The news around Spotify continues. So, Spotify of course, has a new app in the app store that allows you to make direct purchases from Spotify in-app by directing you to a page which tells you how to buy stuff and that enables you to buy stuff.
This is thanks to the ruling in the Epic Games against Apple lawsuit, which has said that Apple can't take a slice of the revenue from in-app purchases anymore.
I'm still trying to think of a really good sort of pun for how to talk about a slice of apple pie. So, if anyone has any suggestions, do let us know.
But anyway, the pie cannot be sliced in Apple's direction anymore. It seems that Spotify has already seen a substantial uptick in paid subscriptions through its iOS app as a result of this.
In the two weeks since the new app has been in the store, it seems that subscriptions on Android have remained stable while subscriptions through iOS have seen an uptick.
So, it seems as though this new ruling really is having an impact, and obviously that affects the potential market that we all have and ways in which we can be paid directly for our work.
So, it seems like there's continuing good news around that.
What else has been going on?
Global Legislation on AI and Creativity
Dan Holloway: People have been getting upset about the legislation around AI. That's probably the thing to finish on.
There's been this narrative for the last few months that different governments around the world have had a different approach when it comes to balancing technology and creativity. In particular, it's been seen that the US has had this slight hardline pro-tech approach.
The previous government here in the UK has had a very pro-tech approach in opposition to that.
The European Union has taken a procreator approach. So, its AI Act has demanded transparency, has demanded people get paid, has demanded all sorts of things that seem eminently reasonable for the sake of protecting its creative industries, and the tech industry, as has been getting really quite cross about this.
Now, however, it seems that creators are worried that the actual implementation of the act might see considerable watering down. So, a group of them have all got together, lead, it seems by Benny from ABBA. So, I'm sure they've got together in sing-song fashion to try and campaign to European legislatures to make sure that creators are still protected as these acts get enacted international legislation.
People are also, of course, still worried in the UK after the upper chamber had amended our AI legislation to ensure transparency would be embedded in law and the elected lower chamber removed those measures.
So, publishing organizations have been getting together and complaining vigorously about this and saying, we know you say you want to do the best, and the reason you're getting rid of this is because you think you can do a better piece of legislation that just focuses on creatives, but we want some reassurances that you're actually going to do this and when you actually do this, it really will protect people, so make sure you keep speaking to us in the creative industries.
I would add to that, make sure you keep speaking to indie authors as well, which seems like an ideal note on which to leave it.
Keep speaking to indie authors, what could be a better way to end than that and send you off into what I hope will be another lovely week.
I will speak to you again at this time next week. Thank you.
