Pittsburgh author among writers who encountered AI-generated versions of original books

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Former Wall Street Journal reporter John Miller is a lifelong baseball fan. He grew up in Belgium with — thanks to family in Maryland — a particular fondness for the Baltimore Orioles.

More recently, Miller, who lives in Pittsburgh, spent three full years researching and writing a biography of legendary Orioles manager Earl Weaver. He dug through newspaper archives and crisscrossed the country to conduct more than 200 interviews with people who knew, or knew about, the famously argumentative yet innovative skipper.

“The Last Manager,” Miller’s first book, was published by Simon & Schuster in March 2025, just in time for baseball season. But as a short search on Amazon revealed, it quickly had company.

“I punch in the title and then, to my surprise, there were like nine different versions of my book and none of them were by me,” Miller said.

The books had titles like “Earl Weaver: The Science of Rage,” “The Life and Legacy of Earl Weaver” and — this one’s in German — “Earl Weaver Biografie.”

Earl Weaver retired from baseball in 1986 and died in 2013. Improbably, eight of these other books about him were published in the couple of months after Miller’s “Last Manager” came out; one actually hit Amazon a couple weeks before.

The books, Miller determined, were all created by generative artificial intelligence. As far as he could tell, none of them outright plagiarized “The Last Manager” or any other writing about Weaver, and most appeared to be full-length volumes.

Rather, it seemed that whoever was prompting the AI software to spit out these volumes about the Hall of Famer, each probably generated in seconds or minutes, were simply exploiting the success of the critically acclaimed biography Miller had sweated over for three years.

“They’re surfing on the attention that my book generated and they’re trying to make a buck,” said Miller, who’s also head baseball coach at Allderdice High…

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