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community weblog
"Never met him"
"No living American historian is as prolific as Blake Whiting. In one week alone last fall, he published 13 books on a host of complex archaeological and historical subjects, ranging from the collapse of Near Eastern civilizations in 1177 BCE to the recent discovery of a huge Silk Road–era city in Central Asia."
Who Is Blake Whiting?
The most astonishingly productive historian in recent times is someone you'll never meet
"...Amazon sells his hardbacks for $28.99, the paperbacks for $20.99, and the Kindle versions for a bargain $7.99. What you can't buy from Amazon at any price, however, is Blake Whiting's CV. Though the books claim to be copyrighted in his name, you won't find an author picture or bio, nor will you find his website or Instagram. He does not belong to the faculty of any college or university, and he is unknown to those academics he cites in his books—which are not actually copyrighted.
Whiting, as you have guessed, is neither historian nor human."
posted by clavdivs on Apr 17, 2026 at 2:25 PM
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Only when the last research paper has been harvested, the last study been scanned, and the last profession poisoned, will we realize we cannot teach slop.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 2:41 PM
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I largely run counter to the anti-AI crowd here on MeFi, but this really does make me angry.
Although on a positive note, this line toward the end of the article made me kinda smile, just because it evokes whimsy (not the plagiarism - the sheep and flowers part): "It's enough to make me want to head for the hills and spend the rest of my days tending sheep or picking daisies," says Cline.
posted by davidmsc at 2:49 PM
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He's a minor leaguer, and a Mormon
posted by chavenet at 3:25 PM
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This seems like blatant fraud to me. But no law must interfere with a corporation's right to profit!
Christ, what a bunch of assholes.
posted by SaltySalticid at 3:44 PM
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No living American historian is as prolific
I see what you did there.
posted by notoriety public at 3:56 PM
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I don't know how I stumbled across her (or "her"), but it looks like Eleanor Whitcombe may be more of the same. I can't find a reference to her outside of Amazon and the covers all look AI generated. A least this time they went to the effort of faking an author picture and bio.
There are many others. I was amused and appalled to find a large series of computer science topic books. The "author" is an attractive Chinese woman and features prominently on the covers.
Amazon, of course, has no incentive to do anything about it.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 4:27 PM
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Yeah, this shit is a real problem! Futurism just found a PR firm doing this at scale with news.
We're not the only target. Once we started looking into National Today, we realized that it's doing the same thing to countless other publications, ranging from top newspapers to local newsrooms across the country: stealing their original reporting and using it to publish a torrent of what appear to clearly be AI-generated articles, complete with bizarre errors and hallucinations. The scope is immense. We tried to count how many it published in a single day, but lost count around 300.
The site's theft is blatant. In a single article it published this week about writer and actress Lena Dunham, National Today plagiarized direct quotes from three separate interviews Dunham gave to prominent outlets — The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian — without attributing any of them.
In a particularly ghoulish example, last week National Today stole the work of Mellie Valencia, a reporter at the East Texas broadcaster KTRE who had reported out a heartbreaking story about a local mother whose 10-year-old daughter tragically passed away from a rare brain tumor in March. Despite the deeply sensitive nature of the reporting, National Today still spat out a plagiarized copy.
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:56 PM
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Readers, however, seem unaware that "Blake Whiting" is not a flesh-and-blood author. "Fascinating read!" wrote one Amazon reviewer of a book about the important Turkish archaeological site called Gobekli Tepe.
This seems oddly credulous with respect to the realness of the reviewers, given what the rest of the article is about.
posted by atoxyl at 6:21 PM
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Possibly got his inspiration from E. Blake Whiting
posted by BWA at 7:43 PM
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Amazon sells his hardbacks for $28.99, the paperbacks for $20.99, and the Kindle versions for a bargain $7.99.
The books are not listed in the U.S. Public Records System; works created entirely with AI cannot be copyrighted, since their authors are not human.
So if the works are in the public domain, then I, or anyone, should be free to publish my own version at Amazon's minimum price of 99 cents. (It's technically possible to get an ebook on Amazon for free, but it takes some effort.)
posted by Naberius at 8:12 PM
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What?
FREDERIC P. MILLER, AGNES F. VANDOME, JOHN MCBREWSTER (ED.) is evolving!
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 9:11 PM
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I enjoy the way "Blake Whiting" rhymes with "Fake Writing".
posted by flabdablet at 1:01 AM
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It's Never Lurgi, do you mean Eleanor Whitcombe the author of THE TIME TRAVELER HYPOTHESIS: COULD ALIENS BE US FROM THE FUTURE? HOW LEGENDS, SCIENCE, AND UFO SIGHTINGS REVEAL OUR POSSIBLE CONNECTION WITH FUTURE HUMANS and BEFORE HUMANITY: REVEALING THE HIDDEN EVIDENCE OF CIVILIZATIONS THAT RULED EARTH LONG BEFORE US?
Books under this profile purport to cover Rome, Greece, the UK, the Aztecs, Mexico, Canada, Egypt, and Australia, as well as women's history, food history, Black American history, and comprehensive reviews of the entirety of human civilization. What a fucking disgusting state of affairs we live in.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:37 AM
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Firstly, Eric Clines 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed is a fantastic book! Go get it now. A professor I know who studies the Bronze Age recommended it to me.
Secondly, stop buying anything from Amazon.
posted by vacapinta at 2:25 PM
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At one point in time I thought that Amazon would be hurt by massive amounts of self-published garbage by every bad SF and cringey urban fantasy writer wannabe out there.
Now I find those things sort of endearing. Hey, your 27 book MilSF series absolutely sucks, my good man, and your seven book sparkly-vampires-in-love-with-obvious-author-insert is terrible, but I respect you all for actually having written the damn things.
I'm sorry that your hard work (even if it's not very good) is being crowded out by people who skipped the whole "work" part.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 9:36 AM
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