AI-generated books flood Amazon, squeezing out human authors
Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
A study of 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books on Amazon from 2023 to 2026 found that books with substantial AI-generated text (>25%) make up a large share of the catalog but a smaller share of sales. However, they are winning a growing share of sales and top-rank positions over time. The number of selling books grew 19.2-fold while revenue grew only 8.9-fold, so revenue per book fell. Books without AI text lose the most ground in genres with high AI diffusion, especially where Kindle Unlimited is popular. Among top sellers, AI-heavy books draw on more distinctive language from existing books, and this overlap rises with revenue, a pattern not seen for non-AI books. Generative AI can reshape a creative market through scale rather than quality.
Generative AI can thus reshape a creative market through scale rather than quality.
- illwrks
I have been tinkering with this over the past few months. One story with a specific genre and demographic target, but as I've been reading each draft there are so many small issues that crop up, inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. Unless your goal is to become an editor of AI content, it's not worth the effort.
Perhaps in time it will be better but you will need a proper pipeline to write, assess, track changes etc... perhaps all that's needed is a GitHub of sorts for writing.
However... what is the chance of any book finding an audience if there are so many to compete with. It might make more sense in having something created just for you though.
- obscurette
I grew up and went into school in seventies in Soviet Union. I remember myself discovering local libraries, bookstores etc. I still love books, I have a lot of them, but process of discovery is very different. When I was young almost every book I found in library or bookstore about topic I was interested in, was almost certainly worth to read. Publishing books was slow and expensive process and there was a very slim chance that not good books were published at all. During last decades it hasn't been a case any more and I had to develop a skills how to find a stuff worth to read – what reviews to trust etc. In AI age these skills became almost worthless as well and I trust only recommendations from people I know and trust.
- MasterScrat
I don’t see how this market ("mostly" AI-written books) won’t get arbitraged to death with the cheaper and open-weight models that keep coming out
- FreeTrade
Gen AI is at a point now where it can write good chapters. You still need a human editor to make it coherent, plug plot holes and tie it all together.
So if you can write a good book, but can't write good chapters, a Gen AI ghostwriter is an ideal tool.
Output quality will vary.
- pen2l
I feel like the genie is out of the bottle. Second order effects and third order effects to markets all around, societal impacts deriving from economic changes and changing incentives galore are yet to be seen. Appreciation of original creative works, motivation to create original works when AI can spit out vast amounts of content, (newly) the effort required to even discover and curate original work that's been created with intention and thought, etc., a lot of these new things have to be reckoned with.
But it doesn't feel good. At the moment it feels scary. Crossing my fingers we get through this somehow.
- FinnLobsien
I don’t see a world in which this doesn’t just annihilate the current market for books.
If I can write a query into Amazon for a book on topic X, I can write that query into ChatGPT or whatever and cut out the middleman.
Some of this may work in the short term while some people still equate the format “book” with “went through a rigorous process”.
That erosion was underway before AI (e.g. on Amazon I instinctually ignore any self-published Kindle books), but I can’t imagine this will last.
I think/hope the market will somehow make human-written books easy to recognize.
- blurayfin
Their entire analysis is based on the assumption that Pangram 3.3 is a reliable tool for detecting AI-generated content. What if not?
- skeledrew
Love it. The next step that I've been patiently waiting for, even before LLMs were a thing, is the automatic generation of anime from manga. Got works that I've been wishing for so long would get an anime adaptation, or even in progress anime that fell off with parts of the manga left uncovered. Going to be wild when people can point AI to a manga with the prompt "adapt this into an anime series/movie, using the style of X other manga with an anime adaptation". Heck it's actually already possible, given Hell Grind[0] exists; just for someone to bring the particular pieces together.
[0] https://higgsfield.ai/original-series/hell-grind/episode-1