"Just Kidding" with AI: How Scammers Stole My Name

Thoreau and Hemingway, and even the most famous authors from 30 years ago, would not be able to comprehend what I went through yesterday. In fact, I'm finding it challenging for most people today to understand what has happened. It even took me a while to figure out the correct way to explain it. In a sentence, someone is creating counterfeit downloadable PDFs using my name and the name of three of my online courses — Just Kidding and Raising Kids, Parasites in Goats, and Your Home Dairy. Of course, everyone wants to put this in a context they understand, so let me also tell you what it is not. It is not copyright infringement. No one has copied anything that I actually created. Since before my first book was published in 2011, piracy of e-books has been common. I would be getting Google alerts about pirated ebooks within 2 or 3 days of my book hitting online bookstores. The publisher would send a takedown notice and then forget about it. Most of those people are not in the U.S., and there's not a lot you can do to stop them. Pirated books usually sell because the person who put it out there has paid nothing for it, so they can price it so far below the price of a legitimate bookseller that people buy it. The author and the publisher see $0 from that sale. It sucks, but authors try to make ourselves feel better by saying that the people who bought it never would have spent the money to purchase it from someone legitimate. For the last few years, people have started to create content using AI and then publish it under the name of a recognized expert. I first heard of this when an AI-generated book on writing was published on Amazon under the name of a well-known publishing industry professional. That didn't last long because Amazon was good about removing counterfeit content. However, anyone can create a website today. On the site where my name is being used, you can also find products with the names of people like Tony Robbins, Alex Hormozi, Brendan Burchard, and other people who are really famous. Their courses are normally sold for thousands of dollars, but you can get them on this site for the bargain price of only $70 each. Or get a membership for $200 and get any 5 courses. I've always joked that on a fame scale of 1 to 10, I am a 2. Never in a million years did I think that anybody would use my name to sell something. But then I noticed that the website is selling over 13,000 products! I guess they've already gone through all of the really famous course creators, and that's how long it took them to decide they needed to have somebody selling goat courses on there. This actually unfolded humorously at first because the first PDF I discovered being advertised on Facebook was supposedly my course, 'Just Kidding and Raising Kids.' It was described as a course on parenting and had absolutely glowing reviews. I laughed as I read the whole description. It was definitely written by AI because it thought that it was a book about raising children with a sense of humor — just kidding, right? Then I discovered an ad for my dairy course, which was actually presented as a downloadable journal where you keep track of your home dairy production. Definitely not funny, and I responded to that discovery with a groan, but it wasn't exactly worrisome. But when I saw the first ad for my course, Parasites in Goats, I started to read it and then gasped and then screamed at the computer. Nooo! Anyone who follows me in the goat world knows that I have spent more than a decade trying to help people understand how much goat parasite information has changed in the last 20 years. Google has continued to send people to information that was published on university websites in the early 2000s, even though it is horrendously outdated. And that outdated information continues to be shared in blogs and on social media, where people follow it — and goats die. AI is very hit or miss when it comes to the kind of information you're going to get on parasites. Some of it is good, some of it is outdated, and some of it comes from myths that get shared online a lot. This is why, when I got an invitation from Delphi to create my AI clone, I refused. I was surprised I even got the invitation, but why not? They probably have AI crawling the web and finding video content and are inviting lots of video creators to create their own clones. I know some online coaches and course creators have done this, including those famous people I listed above. But the reality is that when AI is creating business content, it's highly unlikely that it's going to say something that's going to cause the death of an animal. If it gets a little nuance wrong on a business topic, no one's going to make a life-or-death decision based on that. They're also not going to make said decision in a panic within seconds or minutes. This is why I don't want an AI clone of myself answering questions online. And I definitely don't want people putting my name on AI-created content that I know is going to contain incorrect information. I resigned myself to the fact that Google sends people to websites with outdated information and that people are going to ask AI questions and get bad answers. But how do I resign myself to the fact that people are now creating AI content and putting my name on it? It contains information that I would never promote. At best, it's going to hurt my reputation as a trusted goat educator if people purchase those PDFs believing that I wrote those things. At worst, goats are going to die. Sure, I could submit a takedown notice to the website, but they have 13,000 products for sale, so I'm sure they've already received a lot of takedown notices and ignored them. I could report the pages to Facebook — more than 2 dozen! — but they're just going to create more. Every ad uses a different profile, some of which have an obviously AI-generated female photo, while others have no photos or page substance at all. They have multiple URLs, all of which redirect to the same sales site. Their AI will simply create new profiles and new ads faster than Facebook can take them down — if they take them down, which is not guaranteed. It would be a game of whack-a-mole that I would never win. No human can move as fast as AI. The best I can do is alert my audience about this and tell them where they can find my legitimate courses, which isonly on my website. I do NOT sell any downloadable PDFs, so if you see one, it's not mine. And if someone says that I promoted an idea that I would never promote, ask them if they got that info from a PDF that they purchased, and let them know that I don't sell information in downloadable PDFs, so it's a counterfeit product. Yesterday, at the end of the day, I realized there really wasn't a lot I could do to stop this. It's actually not new. I knew the woman who was the first person to make $10 million in an online course on Teachable five or six years ago, and people were creating courses that pretended to be hers. But — big BUT here — her course was about stock trading and cost $5,000, so humans were willing to spend the time to create a course that looked like hers. Five years ago, no one would have been willing to create a $97 counterfeit course because it wouldn't have been worth their time. Today, however, AI can create a PDF, a fake Facebook profile, and a sales page while you're having a coffee break. If you only sell three or four versions of that product, it's fine because you've got 13,000 others to sell. Ultimately, that's really the only comfort I have — hoping that nobody actually finds those PDFs and purchases them. But as someone wise once said, 'Hope isn't a strategy.' Many have said that as AI becomes more common and it gets harder and harder to know what's authentic, community is going to once again become very important in our lives. That's why I'm so grateful that I'm already way ahead of the scammers, because I have all of you who are following me on Substack, as well as 14,000+ regular email subscribers and 150 members of Goats 365. And I hope that all of you, regardless of where you fit into my community, will let your friends know where they can really find me online. It is in these community spaces where we can keep it real. Thanks for being a part of it.