brendan halpin

A few weeks ago, I read a piece on 404 Media about how Hoopla was full of AI-generated slop. Then there was a followup about how Hoopla was removing the AI-generated books in its catalog. (I’m not linking to either because they’re paywalled, which is a shame because the information is important.)

Well, I guess Hoopla removed the books mentioned in the article, but that’s far from all the books. I went looking for a fantasy book to read, and folks, Hoopla is essentially unusable at this point.

I should point out that all the titles I’m about to reference are available across ebook retailers—Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, etc. So this is far from uniquely a Hoopla problem. I suspect it’s a problem with whatever service these scammers are paying to distribute their AI-written ebooks.

The AI-generated books seem to fall into two categories. Let’s take a look, shall we?

1. Books with incomprehensible or just startlingly bland titles.

The best example of this is The Secret Trail of Yeti The Alps by “Guillermina Medina,” but then there’s Meeting and Falling In Love by “New York Times Bestselling Author Montserrat Medina,” Pursuit of Fairness by “Kacper Grabowski,” Unfortunate Wandering Knight by “Jorge Sanchez,” Britannia Football Stadium by “Terence Maypic,” and who can forget Mysterious Case Investigation Group by “Kemal Yarsin”?

All of these books have horrible blurbs—most are every bit as bland as the title. Shoutout to whoever prompted the AI to create the Kemal Yarsin book, though, because at least here the prose is bad enough to be entertaining:  “He didn't become a sandbag, but I became a human sand mat.When we fell to the ground together, I almost vomited out my heart, liver, spleen, lungs and kidneys.”

1. Books masquerading as series because they’ve been broken into 10 different 40-page segments to drive more sales and borrows.

These include The Enchanted Forest by “Matilda Ferguson,” Divinity Strikes Back by “Ruby Henderson,” Green Wood Spiritual Classic by “Stephanie Pricerny” (okay, this one is also eligible for the “incomprehensible or bland title” category), Mumbai: Mysterious Prophecy by “Gabriel Marques” and Against the Dark Gods by “Manuel Rodriguez.”

As you can see, there are a lot of these books. I haven’t listed them all, but I did count them. 46 of the first 200 results for fantasy novels are AI slop. So very nearly a quarter of the fantasy novels you can find on Hoopla (at least browsing through the Boston Public Library) are scammy garbage.

Of course these books are available on ebook retailers as well. I have no idea what percentage of the available books they represent, but I’ll bet it’s getting bigger by the day.

This is bad for reasons beyond the obvious “people shouldn’t be tricked into reading machine-generated words no one could be bothered to write.”

One of the good things about the ebook revolution is that it has allowed people to skip the gatekeepers and publish books on their own that they couldn’t find an agent or editor to say yes to. This means more diverse authors and perspectives, and that’s a good thing.

Or it was. Because AI scammers have oozed through this gap where professional gatekeepers were, and now browsing for an ebook means adopting a defensive posture—how do I know this was actually written and not machine generated? This takes the fun out of browsing, but, more significantly, it’s going to make people far more wary of taking a chance on a book by an author they don’t know. Better to read something put out by a big 5 (is it big 4 now? I don’t know) publisher, because at least you know it was created by a human. It’s not realistic to expect people to run searches on every author and go, “Hmm, there’s a business guy in Poland named Kacper Grabowski, but he doesn’t mention writing a book anywhere, so I guess this one’s probably fake.”

So AI slop is poisoning the ebook well. But there’s something doubly devious about it polluting our library shelves. Because public libraries are funded by our taxes, and they are using that money to subscribe to Hoopla, and, long story short, some of your probably too limited library budget is going into the bank accounts of grifters using AI to game the system. At a time when libraries are under attack, this is really unconscionable.

I have used and enjoyed Hoopla for years (no waiting lists! Borrows that last 3 weeks rather than the 2 you get from Overdrive), but I will probably stick to Overdrive/Libby going forward, and I’m going to ask my library to stop subscribing to Hoopla unless it does something about this.