The Book About Maui Fires Is AI-Generated

19th August 2023

The Book About Maui Fires Is AI-Generated

The book about Maui fires Is AI-written (Twitter)

The Claim

Two days after the spread of wildfire in Maui, Hawaii, a book was published on Amazon about the fires, titled, “Fire and Fury: The Story of the 2023 Maui Fire.”

News posted on

Emerging story

Two days after the spread of wildfire in Maui, Hawaii, a book was published on Amazon about the fires, titled, “Fire and Fury: The Story of the 2023 Maui Fire.”

Social media users started to post conspiracy theories alleging that the book was written in advance and this is proof that the fires were not nature-made.

That's interesting

A book, "Fire and Fury: The Story of the 2023 Maui Fire and its Implications for Climate Change", was published while the fires were still happening pic.twitter.com/pO6trbVtCS
— Vision4theBlind (@Vision4theBlind) August 16, 2023

A supporting image within the article body

Misbar’s Analysis

Misbar investigated the circulating claim and found it to be misleading.

After looking at the language of the 44-page book, and conducting some texts on AI detectors, Misbar’s team found that the book was written using AI.

The Book About Maui Fires Is Written Using AI

The summary provided of the book on Amazon and other online shops does not sound to be written by a human. Misbar’s team analyzed the summary using online AI detectors and found it to be 100% Likelihood of Complete AI content.

Moreover, Misbar’s team ran some of the paragraphs of the book on AI detectors and found that most of the content is AI-generated.

This suggests that the author managed to publish the book after only two days of the wildfire spreading due to using AI with some edits on the content.

Who is Dr. Miles Stone?

There is not much information about the author. However, a namesake could be found on GoodReads’ website with a handful of biographies on public figures.

Misbar ran some texts from his other publications on AI detectors and found that Stone also used AI tools in them.

This is a text taken from his newest book, “The Life Story Book of August Wilson - The Poet of Black America: A Life in Ten Plays - August Wilson Biography Book,” published on August 14, four days after publishing “Fire and Fury.” AI detectors' result indicates that the content was written with the help of AI tools.

Amazon Deleted The Book’s Page

Fire and Fury became one of Amazon’s bestseller books after some time of publishing. However, many users gave the book bad reviews due to suspicions. Accordingly, Amazon was notified and deleted the page of the book for “unusual reviewing activity.”

Nonetheless, social media users did not stop posting conspiracy theories about how the fires were actually set up accusing the government of killing people.

AI Written Books

There are more than 200 books on Amazon Kindle that have ChatGPT as the author or the co-author. Authors can now give AI tools simple blocks and the tool will generate good paragraphs.

However, there are ethical questions when using AI tools as they generate texts depending on their datasets from the internet. It is hence possible to generate a text that originally belongs to another author, making authors using AI tools fear plagiarism issues.

This Video Shows an Explosion in Chile, Not the Maui Wildfires