So My Amazon Profile Bio, Which Hasn’t Changed for Over a Decade, Was Supposedly Written by AI... LOL

I woke up to one of those modern literary accusations that is so dumb it almost deserves an award:

Apparently my Amazon author profile bio was “written by AI.” This one:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K8IESG/about

Now, I want everyone to stop for a moment and admire the sheer athleticism required to arrive at that conclusion, because my Amazon profile bio has not meaningfully changed in over a decade.

That’s right. Over ten years.

Which means one of the following must be true:

1. I secretly used artificial intelligence before it became the all-purpose boogeyman for people who confuse confidence with evidence.

2. My stale old author bio was so offensively competent that it traveled back through time and became suspicious retroactively.

3. We are now living in an age where any complete sentence longer than seven words is considered “probably AI.”

I am honestly impressed.

There is something very funny about the idea that my ancient, dusty, cobwebbed Amazon profile bio - a thing I likely updated sometime around the era of bad knees, worse algorithms, and people still pretending Facebook was fun - has now been placed on trial as a futuristic machine artifact.

Yes. Of course. Naturally.

Nothing says “cutting-edge AI deception” quite like a profile that has been sitting there untouched long enough to qualify for a museum label.

Exhibit A: An author bio written years ago.

Exhibit B: The internet discovering in 2026 that biographies are sometimes polished.

Conclusion: ROBOTS.

That’s the level of scholarship we’re dealing with.

And this is what kills me about so much online nonsense now: people no longer need proof. They just need a vibe. A hunch. A whiff. A passing breeze of suspicion.

They squint at something and say, “Hmm. This feels generated.”

Generated by what, exactly? Literacy? Revision? The radical act of reading one’s own sentences before posting them?

Because if that’s where we are, then heaven help anyone who uses punctuation correctly. Every semicolon is now probable cause, and apparently any prose that uses an em dash is AI. Which is fascinating, since I was using em dashes by the thousand long before AI became the internet’s favorite explanation for everything.

I can just imagine the forensic process:

“Let’s see... this profile bio is coherent... the thoughts are arranged in order... the wording is not completely feral... yes, this was clearly produced by a machine.”

Terrifying.

I hate to disappoint the amateur detectives, but some of us were writing full paragraphs before Silicon Valley started stuffing chatbots into everything that can blink.

I know, I know. It’s a shocking theory.

But not everything online was made by AI. Some of it was made the old-fashioned way: by a human being sitting at a keyboard, probably tired, probably underpaid, probably irritated, and almost certainly wishing everyone would calm down.

Also, let’s be honest. If I were going to use futuristic super-technology to fabricate my public image, do we really think I would spend that power on an Amazon profile?

Really?

Not on marketing? Not on discoverability? Not on getting actual readers to leave actual reviews? Not on making the algorithm stop acting like my books are contraband?

No. According to this brilliant line of thought, I apparently used advanced machine intelligence to create... a standard author description.

That is some wonderfully small ambition for a criminal mastermind.

And that’s the broader joke here. We’ve reached the point where “AI” is no longer just a tool or a technology. It’s become a lazy accusation people throw at anything they don’t like, don’t understand, or don’t believe a person they’ve already decided to dislike could have written.

It saves time, I suppose. Why wrestle with facts when you can just yell “AI!” and run away feeling clever?

Meanwhile, my allegedly suspicious profile bio continues doing what it has done for years: sitting there. Existing. Being a profile bio. In public. On Amazon. Without fanfare. Without updates. Without, sadly, an army of robot publicists boosting my sales.

If only.

So let the record show: my Amazon profile bio was not “supposedly written by AI.” It was written in that distant, primitive era when human beings were still blamed for their own sentences.

Ancient times. Dark times. A more civilized age.

And if that old profile now seems too polished, too composed, too humanly competent for some people to believe, I will accept that as the funniest compliment I’ve received all year.

LOL.

Thanks for reading!

- Robert

Remembering My Long-Time Friend Brian Jacques on His 80th Birthday

As I write this, today June 15, 2019, my friend, Brian Jacques, creator of Redwall, would have been 80. Of all the writers I’ve corresponded with over the years, from Raymond Feist to CJ Cherryh to Mercedes Lackey in the hey days of CompuServe, Brian was the wittiest and most fun. It was the highest of honors to host Brian when his fall 2005 book tour of the Western USA brought him to my adopted home town of Olympia, Washington. At the time, I wrote about Brian’s visit on a tribute page to him and his books, which I posted to share with my readers @ http://themagiclands.com/brianjacques.htm. The page is still there, hasn’t changed in 15 years.

One of the best things about Brian’s visit was that my son, Will, who was 13 at the time, got to meet Brian and get all of his Redwall books signed. Will was, and remains, a Redwall fan, having read all of Brian’s books multiple times. My two youngest were also at the signing and they enjoyed getting their pictures taken with my friend Brian. 

As I had promised Brian, I also gave him copies of the children's editions of my books, The Kingdoms & the Elves of the Reaches, which are set in my fantasy world of Ruin Mist. Brian and I enjoyed swapping stories of our created worlds, having bonded over our similar experiences with Catholic school teachers beating us with rulers.  

Brian was a hoot to listen to at author events and book signings. He loved his characters and got into the role of his characters actively in the telling. Brian loved a good feast as well, as any attentive Redwall fan knows.

Brian also challenged me to give back to readers and the writing community, to share my personal skills and experiences with others. Brian always spoke fondly of his days working with blind children and how he got his start. Early conversations with Brian were key in inspiring me to dedicate many hours and years to give away one million books to schools, libraries, community centers and others, though especially to teachers in classrooms who needed books for their students who otherwise would have no books at all as well as to schools for the blind, like the one in rural Scotland where students had access for many years to my entire catalog of books, including many educational and learning titles in the Bugville Critters, at no cost.

To say Brian Jacques loved the written word is an understatement. Brian lived for the written word and I think the only thing he loved more was bringing his stories and ideas to life with spoken word. Brian and I had running conversations about digital audio and in particular Audible, where my books had been runaway bestsellers--#1 Fiction, #1 Fantasy, #1 YA/Childrens for many weeks in spring and summer 2005. Brian was more familiar with traditional audio on tape and hesitant about the digital world--ebooks, kindle, audible, and such. I don't know if my words on the subject swayed his thoughts on the subject, but I'd like to think so, as his books did start to become available for both kindle and audible.

In the fall of 2005, none of us could have known that Brian would be taken from the world just a few years later. I was, in fact, looking forward to his promised next West coast USA tour and another visit with my long-time friend. For me, Brian Jacques will forever remain one of the true few who could paint pictures with words.

We all miss you, Brian, though it is perhaps fitting that the final Redwall book is about rogues. As a rogue scoundrel who worked many odd jobs in his life, this was perhaps Brian’s last wink and nod to the world.

Goodnight, Brian. Goodnight, Redwall.

Thanks for reading, I’m William Robert Stanek, Microsoft’s #1 author for nearly 20 years, and author of over 250 topselling books.