AI ‘book thieves’ copied Holocaust survivor’s memoir, says author

Co-author Kate Thompson (right) pressured Amazon to remove AI-altered Holocaust survivor Renee Salt's memoir.

• AI book thieves rewrote Holocaust survivor Renee Salt’s memoir to sell for profit, claims co-author Kate Thompson.
• The manipulated versions were sold on Amazon and Goodreads, using anti-Semitic pseudonyms.
• Following pressure, the AI-generated memoirs were removed, but Thompson emphasised the ethical issues with AI misuse.

AI book thieves rewrote a Holocaust survivor’s memoir to sell for profit, its author has claimed.

Renee Salt, born in Poland in 1929, survived the ghetto, Auschwitz and later Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

She lost her parents and scores of relatives in the camps, and her life story was recorded in the 2025 memoir A Mother’s Promise: My true story of surviving Auschwitz and the horrors of the Holocaust.

Kate Thompson, a journalist and the book’s co-author, believes someone took the Kindle version of the text and used AI to tweak it, before releasing the new version under the reworked titled Renee Salt memoir: A Mother’s Promise: A Holocaust survivor’s story of love, loss and unbreakable hope.

She said this computer-generated reworking was then put up for sale on platforms Amazon and Goodreads.

Thompson said it was “clearly the dark side of AI” and expressed shock that someone thought the “very personal story was fair game for anyone with a reasonable knowledge of AI and what books were selling well on Amazon”.

Following pressure from Thompson, the AI memoir was removed from Amazon and Goodreads.

A Mother's Promise, the true story of Renee Salt’s survival of the Holocaust, written with Kate Thompson.

Anti-Semitic pseudonyms

However, Thompson was shocked to find another manipulated version of the Holocaust survivor’s life story was uploaded to the platforms.

This time it was given the altered title From Darkness To Light: The Remarkable Journey of Holocaust Survivor Renee Salt.

Whoever had altered the text using AI, in order to change it just enough to avoid copyright claims, put the book on sale for £8.99 ($20).

The person who took and manipulated the text also appears to have used mocking pseudonyms, Thompson said.

One AI book thief went by the name Jude, German for “Jew”, while the other went by “Penny Pincher”.

Thompson said: “Creaming profit off the hard work of a 95-year-old who escaped the gas chambers is about as low as it is possible to get.

“I suppose therefore the problem isn’t AI. The problem is the humans who use it.”

Amazon told The Times, which first reported on the claims, that it invests “significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed” and would remove books that did not adhere to them.

A spokeswoman said: “We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale, and we have proactive and reactive methods that help us detect content that violates our guidelines, whether AI-generated or not.”