An Indian court has ordered an investigation into allegations that a public library in the southern state of Tamil Nadu bought hundreds of books suspected of having been generated with AI.
The Madras High Court has told the state's anti-corruption agency to investigate the purchases and has frozen bank accounts linked to a publisher accused of supplying the books.
A novelist noticed first
The controversy began when Tamil novelist Perumal Murugan raised concerns about books containing false information and questionable authorship at a newly opened library in Coimbatore.
Murugan — whose novels Pyre and One Part Woman have been recognised internationally — visited last month and wrote in an online magazine that nearly 1,800 books in the Tamil section had been supplied by a little-known publisher called Agal Vilakku Pathippagam.
He said many carried unfamiliar authors' names, unusually high prices and questionable ISBNs. It is a good list of warning signs, and none of them requires any technical test: a reader who knows the field simply recognised that the shelves were wrong.
The errors inside the books
One book cited in the row, Naladiyar Vaazhvin Vazhikatti (A Guide to Life through Naladiyar), was reportedly priced at 1,445 rupees for 300 pages. It describes Naladiyar as a Tamil poet and philosopher. Naladiyar is not a person. It is a classical Tamil work of 400 four-line verses on morality and ethics.
Another book reportedly attributes the ancient Tamil poem Madurai Kanchi to the wrong author.
That specific kind of mistake — confidently turning a text into a person, getting an attribution exactly wrong while sounding authoritative — is characteristic of a language model with no source to check against. It is not, by itself, proof. It remains unclear whether AI was used to produce any of the disputed books.
A name used without permission
Questions have also been raised about a book found at another public library, in Madurai. Democracy and People's Rights in the Contemporary World, published by Phoenix Publishing House, names the economist Jean Drèze as its author.
Drèze told The Hindu newspaper this week that he had not written it, raising the concern that his name was used without his permission.
BBC Tamil visited a Chennai address listed by Agal Vilakku and by Phoenix Publishing House and found no signs identifying either business.
The money and the politics
The library at the centre of the case is the Periyar Arivulagam, built at a cost of about 3bn rupees ($34m; £26m) and named after the social reformer Periyar E V Ramasamy. It was inaugurated on 16 October by Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay.
The state government has blamed the previous DMK-led administration for buying the books; the DMK denies the allegations. School Education Minister A Rajmohan has called the allegations potentially "India's first AI scam" and said the investigation will cover purchases at other public libraries across the state.
Why this matters beyond Tamil Nadu
The case exposes a gap that applies anywhere books are bought with public money, Bangladesh included. Procurement checks price, invoice, ISBN and delivery. None of those tests whether a human wrote the book.
Generating a plausible 300-page volume is now cheap and fast, and the resulting text is fluent enough to pass a shelf inspection. What caught this was not a system but a novelist who knew the subject well enough to notice that a poem had been turned into a poet.
