Valley mom fighting to pull AI-generated book on Amazon that used info from her own book about her daughter’s death

A Kentville woman who recently published a book about the life and death of her daughter is upset that someone took her story and used artificial intelligence to create a short book with a different title and cover.

Jennifer Holleman wrote Forever Twenty-One: Maddison’s Story about her daughter getting caught up in the world of human trafficking, unable to escape until she died in a car that crashed while being driven by a john.

The book went live through Amazon earlier this month and was a top seller. But then, Wednesday night, one of Maddison’s friends messaged her to say a friend had been looking for the book and sent a screen shot of the Amazon page that showed not only Holleman’s, but another with the grammatically challenged title Life of Maddison Fraser: A Young Girl Life Cut Short.

The book, which is full of spelling mistakes and wrong information, as is common with the use of poor AI programs, has a photo of Maddison on the cover that is not in Holleman’s book and appears to have been gleaned from social media, placed against a different background, and either changed the colour of her clothes or photoshopped in a new outfit.

“Stuff was in there that made no sense. When I talk about the man in the car being a john, they’re referring to him as having the name John and saying he died in the accident.”

She said the name on the fake book has four other titles on Amazon, all very short, “so he probably did the same thing, took a story and just paraphrased it,” Holleman said.

She called Amazon and was put through to Kindle Direct Publishing, which produced the book for her.

“I haven’t heard anything back from them yet, they said to expect something in one to two days.”

She said she wants the book taken down.

“It shows on Amazon right under my book,” Holleman said. “I was pretty upset by that.”

She said she’s not discouraged but is disappointed that an “opportunistic leech” would try to benefit from her work.

“It’s disheartening. It bothers me, but with any luck at all they’ll pull it.”