YouTube Is Crawling with Pirated Audiobooks Made Using A.I. (NYT, 5/21/26)

[highplainsdem]

-snip-

While piracy has long been an issue for the book business, the rapid rise of unauthorized audiobooks on YouTube, which publishers and authors believe are eroding sales for their books, poses a new challenge for the industry.

-snip-

Grisham said YouTube should bear some responsibility for the spread of illegally copied audiobooks on its site.

“The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally,” he wrote in an email to The Times. “And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it.”

-snip-

It’s hard to determine how many pirated audiobooks are available on YouTube. People uploading them often try to evade detection by changing the files, adding pauses or music or even slightly altering the text. Sometimes, pirates put unrelated content at the beginning to throw off detection. And when one channel featuring pirated content is taken down, another often takes its place.

-snip-

YouTube IS complicit. They make money from the same ads the book pirates using AI narration make money from.

Google, which owns YouTube, once had an unofficial "Don't be evil" motto, which they've clearly forgotten.

And Google trained its AI on all of YouTube's content, and continues to do so, which means each pirated book gives that book to Google as more training data.

[SheltieLover]

1. Disgusting!

And criminal imo.

[RockRaven]

2. I noticed a parallel AI theft phenomenon on YouTube regarding books...

But the theft being of the general IP/copyrighted characters. Full length, AI generated novels, piggybacking off of a real series, presented as audiobooks.

The other day I searched [author name] [character name] of an old but prolific detective series because I wanted to see if there were any people reviewing or recommending these books these days. What I got as results were dozens of multi-hour videos with bad AI art thumbnails and unfamiliar titles (I have a full set of these real books, and have read them all, and the author is dead so I cannot have missed real new ones). The titles sort of fit the pattern of the real ones but all seemed just a little off; if I was only vaguely familiar with the series/author I might have thought they were real titles.

I did not click on or listen to any of them, so yes I am only assuming that they are AI generated based off of the obviously AI thumbnail and bogus names. But also nobody would put in so many hours of real human labor for something which is clearly a copyright violation, and thereby at risk for being taken down... It would have to be an easy come easy go attitude which points to AI slop.