False, AI-generated “biographies” of German stars sold on Amazon

Christiane Hofmann is churning out biographies of German public figures and stars, even though she doesn’t exist.

NDR investigates AI-generated “biographies”

Research by German public broadcaster NDR has found that Amazon has sold factually incorrect, AI-generated biographies of multiple German public figures and celebrities.

“Biographies” of investigative journalist Oliver Schröm, Die Zeit journalist Alice Bota and former captain of the German national men’s football team, Thomas Müller, were ordered for around 16 euros each and when they arrived, turned out to be around just 100 pages long.

The contents of each book proved robotic and repetitive. While the first chapter of the biography on Oliver Schröm was titled “Childhood and family background”, Thomas Müller’s biographer wrote of his “Family background and childhood” and Alice Bota’s of the journalist’s “Birth and family background”.

“Thomas Müller’s career is proof of the worth of hard work, intelligence and selflessness, which made him one of the most venerated personalities in the history of football,” a typical passage reads.

The prolific Christine Hofmann

It is a single author whom readers have to thank for such groundbreaking insight into the lives of Schröm, Müller and Bota. Christine Hofmann's choice of subjects is so varied and her work so prolific, all while the author remains so elusive that she doesn’t exist.

According to the NDR research, Hofmann’s work is, in fact, 100 percent AI-generated. On a bad day, when Hofmann starts “hallucinating” (i.e. malfunctioning) and can’t find enough information on the internet about her subjects, she is inclined to fabricate.

Hofmann’s malfunctions have led to entire passages about events in Oliver Schröm’s life to which the journalist himself was not privy. Indeed, most of Hofmann’s subjects are unaware of the “biography” she has written about them.

Hofmann's books are printed at an Amazon plant in Poland, and no other publishing information is listed in the books, but the company also seems to be unaware of their contents.

Asked why Amazon was selling these books in such large quantities, the US company said that it has “content guidelines that regulate which books can be offered for sale, and we have proactive and reactive methods that help us identify content that violates our guidelines, regardless of whether it is AI-generated or not.”

While Amazon does not currently explicitly mark which texts are AI-generated, it told NDR that it takes “considerable time and resources” to remove books which do not meet guidelines.