When writer and photographer Kaleb Horton passed away at the end of last month, it only took a few days for a suspicious biography to suddenly appear on Amazon. The book, titled KALEB HORTON: A BIOGRAPHY OF WORDS AND IMAGES: The Life Of A Writer And Photographer From The American West, was 74 pages long and published on Sept. 27, mere days after Horton’s passing.
All the signs point to AI. Even for such a short work, it was turned around way too fast for a book produced by humans. And the image on the cover bears telltale signs of being crafted by AI, including the fact that it looks nothing like Horton. Many of his friends and colleagues wrote their own obituaries for him, many of which were shared the same day the book appeared. They were appalled to learn of it.
“Although many of us online appreciated him and have paid tribute to him as a writer, any real reporting about him — like the kind he did for the figures he obsessed over, and which he would deserve — would reflect that Kaleb was a human being and a complicated guy,” said Matt Pearce, a journalist who knew Horton. “This AI slop is just harvesting the remnants of legacy journalism, insulting the legacies of the dead and intellectually impoverishing the rest of us.”
