Whiting, as you have guessed, is neither historian nor human. His fake persona is harbinger of an alarming trend threatening disaster to academics and journalists alike.

I know this all too well; I am a science and history author who has published extensively on many of the subjects covered in Whiting’s books. I have written magazine features that have been clearly reshuffled, reorganized, and supplemented with other freely available material to masquerade as the unique work of “Blake Whiting.” This is not plagiarism in the old-fashioned sense, in which a few sentences or paragraphs are lifted from a previously published work. This is word-laundering on a truly industrial scale, aided and abetted by one of the world’s largest corporations. Using AI tools and a pseudonym, unknown culprits are now profiting from my work and that of my colleagues. Worse, they are limiting what we can write about in the future. What publisher wants to publish a second book on an archaeological discovery, no matter how significant?

And fucking Amazon is pushing this stuff.