First it was AI-generated book reviews. Now it's entire AI-generated books.
Amazon's marketplace is seeing a wave of AI-written video game guide books appearing for sale alongside legitimate titles. The problem has been documented across guides for several games, including Resident Evil Requiem, Pokopia, and Dragon Quest 7: Reimagined. The books appear to be mass-produced using large language models, then listed on Amazon with minimal human oversight.
This follows an earlier pattern where AI-generated reviews began appearing on Amazon's gaming section, artificially inflating ratings and muddying the signal for actual buyers. The jump from fake reviews to fake products represents an escalation that Amazon's content moderation systems haven't kept up with.
The Practical Problem for Buyers
Game guide books have always been a niche market, but they rely heavily on accuracy. A strategy guide that hallucinates boss patterns, invents item locations, or describes mechanics that don't exist isn't just low-quality - it's useless. And unlike a badly written novel where you might notice the quality on the first page, a game guide's flaws only become obvious when you're mid-playthrough and the advice doesn't match what's on screen.
The economics here are straightforward. These books cost almost nothing to generate, Amazon's self-publishing platform has low barriers to entry, and buyers searching for help with a new game may not scrutinize the publisher before clicking "Buy." It's the same playbook that flooded Kindle Unlimited with AI-generated romance novels and self-help books throughout 2024 and 2025, now applied to gaming.
Amazon's Moderation Gap
Amazon introduced policies in late 2023 requiring authors to disclose AI-generated content when publishing through Kindle Direct Publishing. But enforcement has been spotty at best. The platform processes millions of listings, and distinguishing a lazily written human guide from an AI-generated one isn't something automated systems do reliably.
For anyone buying game guides on Amazon right now, the safest move is checking the publisher name against known guide publishers like Prima, Brady, or Piggyback, and reading sample pages before purchasing. If the writing feels generic, overly padded, or lacks specific in-game screenshots, skip it.
This is a content moderation problem that keeps compounding. Each category of AI-generated spam Amazon fails to contain becomes a template for the next one.