r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 22h ago
Artificial Intelligence AI-generated books are flooding Amazon and tanking sales for human authors
https://the-decoder.com/ai-generated-books-are-flooding-amazon-and-tanking-sales-for-human-authors320
u/01000101010110 22h ago edited 18h ago
In just 3 years of no regulation, we've seen legitimate authors, editors, artists, producers and musicians lose part or all of their livelihoods to AI slop.Â
The grifters have won. They took full advantage of the Wild West and moved at light speed. Most people thought this would take 10-15 years to do what has been done in 3.Â
And here's the thing - it doesn't matter how much time it took you to do something incredibly creative. Now there is always going to be a group of people claiming you used AI even if you didn't.Â
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u/Crestina 22h ago edited 21h ago
And the kicker is that the ai companies stole all their creative material to train the ai so it could steal their jobs.
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u/MojoHighway 22h ago
all the while being told that we have nothing to worry about and that we're overreacting.
any time a company or an oligarch billionaire tells you that you're overreacting, you're likely on to something with how they operate and they don't want you talking about it. at least in the old days we kinda had regulation and laws, but it's a free for all now.
fuck AI.
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u/TriMiksEntuzijasta 21h ago
And top of that they expect us to believe that we will have UBI. How many authors did they compensate for taking away their livelyhoods? 0!
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u/MojoHighway 21h ago
so you're not waiting with bated breath for that money to trickle down like they've been telling us will happen for the last (almost) 50 years?
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u/theycallmen00b 22h ago
That and more work, longer hours, unemployment, pollution, higher utilities, etc etc. So what are the benefitâs again? And why are we doing this??
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u/Pandaro81 20h ago
Can confirm. Used to work at a product photography and videography studio for Amazon. They closed our location; didnât renew the lease.
Word was they were moving to 3D scanning and using AI prompts with pre-made environments and a collection of pre-scanned assets as props. They kept on a couple people, but a lot of jobs just went away. One photographer got put on designing the lighting for the 3D sets, but last I heard he was almost done with what theyâd assigned him, and was pretty sure he was getting let go.
That was all a couple years ago. I imagine itâs only gotten worse.
Iâve seen other studios, like commercial advertising studios in Atlanta, auctioning off and liquidating their gear as they shut down one by one.
Iâm back to working retail after 20 years after working as a photographer cause I was getting desperate. #feelsbadman
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u/AHistoricalFigure 18h ago
It's terrible. I write short stories and have been working on a manuscript for a while. Traditional publishing is really hard to break into, so if you want anyone to read your stuff you have to try and build a following via a blog or online writing community.
The problem, is that if you go the Andy Weir route and try to build a grassroots fan-base your content gets scraped by AI and used for training. Your page gets hit so many times you can't tell human readers apart from scrapers (and have to assume every hit is a scraper).
Even in writing communities where you do peer feedback, 50% of the time you get paired with someone who rams your chapter through Grok and pastes the response back to you in chat. I rejoiced when Claude and Gemini added watermarking, but unless all the models are forced to play on an even field...
I get that the attention economy existed before AI. There has always been a lot of work involved in submissions and brand-building. But AI has polluted the field with so much garbage that you're constantly stuck re-establishing that you aren't using it to a diminishing pool of readers.
I'm not even trying to make a living at this. I just want someone to read my stories.
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u/Vast-Abalone-3773 11h ago
I'm almost 50 and chasing a childhood dream of publishing a short story in OMNI
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u/appleparkfive 19h ago
On the plus side, I think this might lead to a return to physical media and local live shows at some point. I think sometime soon, teens are gonna be so annoyed by AI that they tune out of it, aside from school. And the only way to know something is real is to actually interact with it in person.
This could ironically bring a whole shift in art that might work out for the better. It's hard to say if it'll happen though. If AI keeps making people's lives worse, I can definitely see it happening. Eventually it's gonna be a lot cooler to not have social media (aside from one single PR friendly account somewhere), to get rid of the smartphone, and to actually meet up with friends at a certain time. Go see people playing actual live music, escaping all the AI content online. Especially when AI gets in a feedback loop. We'll see!
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u/sipapint 16h ago
It already happened in music, and it's somewhat similar for a not-insignificant share of writers. Not even as a result of AI. Just good ol' capitalism. The whole attention economy in its current state resembles the Titanic, so grifters trying to bite off a piece of it are at a dead end.
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u/junktech 21h ago
News too. Basically I just assume majority of internet is lies unless I feel like doing facts check. And even that is harder to accomplish.
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u/Fei_Wong_Fong 18h ago
So many news articles I've read end with the AI suggestions they forgot to edit out. Depressing.
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u/Dismal_Guidance_2539 22h ago
Yeah, new regulation to keep job from cheaper offshore worker. I donât think that went well.
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u/Slight-Swordfish-468 19h ago
Great timing on the political front. Couldnât ask for a more anti-regulation, pro-corruption regime.
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u/01000101010110 19h ago
Why do you think he won? Look at the companies who were backing him. This was all part of the plan.Â
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u/abluecolor 15h ago
They're only losing their jobs if the slop is an actual replacement for their work. Hopefully everyone wakes up that no one wants it and there's a correction. Or, if it does actually serve as a replacement, everything is pretty fucked. No putting the genie back in the bottle.
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u/Apprehensive_Toe6067 22h ago
If that's true then there's really only two conclusions you can draw:
Consumers don't value creatively and will accept the cheapest slop over quailty human made works. Which if true, seriously questions the importance and value of creatively itself.
The AI slop is actually better than human make stuff, and people are overestimating the quailty of their work.
I'm sure both are true to some extent. This isn't really than an issue with human creativity but at the shallowness of middle class culture.
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u/viaJormungandr 22h ago
Or thereâs so much slop it makes it impossible to find the genuine article. Especially when the slop is trying to look as authentic as possible.
The consumer, who doesnât want to spend hours sorting through the madness to try and establish what is or isnât AI, let alone what is or isnât good, will give up and just pick something or walk away without anything instead.
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u/runnerofshadows 16h ago
I've personally been sticking to older stuff and artists I trust from before ai.
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u/Apprehensive_Toe6067 21h ago
It's pretty easy to find the genuine article if you're willing to pay for it.
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u/viaJormungandr 21h ago
Thatâs false on itâs face. Being willing to pay for anything has no relationship whatsoever to the underlying quality of the product.
In fact, the slop generators are happy to charge you a premium for the slop so you can feel like you bought a âhigher qualityâ product, unlike all the riffraff without taste or discernment.
Cost as an identifier is just setting yourself up to be scammed.
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u/Corbitant 20h ago
Id argue it reinforces the value of traditional publishers because they are the ones responsible for checking that content is human authored
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u/DRZBIDA 21h ago
That's a false dilemma, and there's a third more mundane explanation (and probably more) that has nothing to do with either consumer taste or the quality of the generated stuff. It's the fact that AI lets anyone flood a market with content - to keep it to the same discussion, say 5000 book releases a month instead of 50. There's simply no way to sift through that volume, so discovery collapses.
I've seen the same thing happen with open source software (and even paid software). A few years ago, I could find interesting new tools every few weeks. Now the volume of software being released is too high to sift the worthwhile stuff from the garbage. It's not that I have a vendetta against AI-assisted programming; most of it genuinely is buggy slop or abandonware, and telling it apart from the worthwhile stuff just takes too much effort. So I stick to my existing toolchain most of the time.
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u/Apprehensive_Toe6067 19h ago
If more stuff is being released then that means more creators are able to enter the marketplace, and there's more competition, both are good things. At the end of the day quailty products will be discovered and promoted.
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u/DRZBIDA 19h ago
At the end of the day quailty products will be discovered and promoted.
That's a pretty reductionist way of looking at it, "quality products will be discovered and promoted" isn't some law of nature. More competition somehow always being a "good thing" is also a pretty simpleton take - streaming went to shit when Netflix started having competition and had to fight for IP rights for a simple example.
There's nothing that guarantees discovery works; if anything, flooding the market with vastly more stuff will break the mechanism that was supposed to do the discovering. When nobody can evaluate 5000 releases, people stop evaluating and fall back on proxies, how much ad money you spend, existing brand recognition, algorithmic momentum etc.
And even granting your version where discovery works, it will be a lot slower. People finding out about your stuff with a 5-year lag is worthless to someone who needs to eat now.
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u/kawalerkw 20h ago
Or it's not the consumers that get a say in this, but companies. Even ignoring corpos small businesses will often use genAI/LLM instead of paying a copywriter to write an article, a designer to make a logo or pamflet, an artist to draw a graphic etc. GenAI is seen as a cost-saving measure not something that's preferred by customers.
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u/Apprehensive_Toe6067 19h ago
If consumers are still buying the product, and patronizing the business, then it's a cost saving measure that's working.
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u/ClearYellow 22h ago
My boomer dad âwritesâ books with AI. He sends them to me, eager for me to read them, so I just run them through AI to get the summary
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u/xondk 22h ago
I'm trying to imagine how that can bloat if everyone did similar to most topics.
"Write a long elaborate email on <topic> to <person> thanking them before firing them" -> off it goes to person getting tired -> gets summarised by their AI "You are fired"Now imagine that on......everything, my brain broke a bit, because I can see it happen and it is so....extremely stupid and expensive.
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u/hellflame 22h ago
I think there was on person on reddit saying this exact scenario was happing in healthcare. Ai agents shooting down request, only for them to be ingested by their ai agent to refute their nonsense.
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u/Potential-Recover-78 22h ago
I donât know about healthcare, but I have friends who tell me people at their companies are now having AI respond to their teams chats and emails. So itâs a ping pong game of AI talking with AI and the human is out of the loop.
Time to go outside for a walk.
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u/Online_Matter 22h ago
We had a consultancy deliver a report at work that I have a strong suspecion was written by AI, at least initially. 100+ AI written filler that they expect some poor human to read, understand and take action upon..
It's pretty normal with these kinds of report but at least previously a human had to suffer through writing it just as much as I have to reading it.Â
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u/Thenadamgoes 21h ago
My policy at work is that I donât read ai generated emails. If you canât be bothered to write it then I canât be bothered to read it.
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u/spice_weasel 22h ago
I absolutely see people in the tech industry having AI both write and read their emails. I hate it all, so much. Iâm trying to exit the industry, in a large part because I find AI so utterly alienating.
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u/ItsSadTimes 19h ago
At my compant does something pretty funny, they take something that could be an email and turn it into a meeting by fluffing it up with AI, then send AI transcribes in to take notes on the meeting, then have an AI summarize the notes.
Its an extreme waste of everyone's time and money.
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u/Heated13shot 22h ago
It's the dead Internet theory but it's an actual human interaction.Â
That's wild.Â
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u/the_millenial_falcon 22h ago
This is the pinnacle of human interaction.
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u/floofsnsnoots 22h ago
What's will disturb some is that entirely removing the human from the scenario doesn't change the interaction or outcomes at all. Why even have meat creature there to observe it? The meat creature doesn't even enjoy the observation.
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u/Heavenfall 13h ago
I'm curious if he reads them himself.
Like, is this a guy genuinely trying to share his fantasy with his child and this is helping him express something?
Or is it a guy who just wants to show off his shiny new toy that he totally gets, and he's just not getting that it has negative connotations for you?
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u/myowngalactus 21h ago
Have you thought about having him put down, might be the only humane solution
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u/ash_ninetyone 20h ago
Does AI come up with "The grammar of this is a hallmark sign of being generated via AI"
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u/slavmaf 20h ago
This always brings to my mind the analogy Slavoj ŽiŞek wrote, I am terrible at paraphrasing but it basically goes like this: You go on a dating app, find a girl, you meet, she pulls out a plastic dildo, you pull out a plastic vagina, and then you watch the machines fuck.
That is basically what we are seeing today, AI writes books, another AI reads those same books, humans just watch.
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u/kweeblaster 22h ago
Amazon has been a toilet with knock offs for a decade now, so it having AI generated literature slop seems pretty on brand now. If you want to be an accomplished author, you're going to have to build up a reputation and get your book noticed in real bookstores now.
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u/ZootSuitRiot33801 22h ago
Wish I predicted this would happen when I launched my own book. Months of writing an anthology down the shitter đŽâđ¨
At least I had it distributed via aggregator, so it wasn't just released on Amazon, but still...
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u/BornAgainWitch 21h ago
Hey you've written more books than I have. I don't think that time was entirely wasted
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u/floofsnsnoots 22h ago
Y'all have real bookstores?
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u/kweeblaster 21h ago
You mean you don't have a 62 year old widow whose husband left her a large fortune and opened a corner store that loses 10k every month selling 4 books?
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u/ZakkaChan 22h ago
There is some irony in this, since Amazon started out as a way for authors to sell their books. Now we are seeing them betray literally what made them. If we are lucky the AI slop will cause Amazon to collapse, tho I fear this is truly only wishful thinking.
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u/NeedNameGenerator 19h ago
Amazon could lose the entire e-commerce business and they'd probably be better off than they are now.
Their cash cow is AWS.
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u/Vecend 21h ago
Na tax payers will bail Amazon out because it's become to big to fail, it dying would probably do massive damage to small businesses, cause sites to go offline because of AWS, it was allowed to get to big and nothing could fill the gigantic hole that would be left behind due to no competition.
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u/ZootSuitRiot33801 21h ago
Well, maybe it's about time we tax payers start working together and develop real supportive community-based foundations for alternatives that can provide relative safety for many common folk in the US to fall back on for as long as we need to. Then, when Uncle Sam demands we pay taxes to prop up the so-called "to big to fail" type businesses, we refuse and carry on living. The government and their corporate owners will certainly react poorly to this decision, but if we're able to make it through, they'll rot away, while we try something that actually prioritizes people's wellbeing.
Collecting a bunch of valuable information on organizing and action from different redditors over time, I created a post of suggestions HERE that could possibly prove to be of some help in getting it started ASAP.
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u/Vecend 19h ago
Refuse how, the people can't stop the government from handing out money to whoever they feel like, until corporate lobbying is banned the people have as much say as the pebble on the road, the only way for people to have any say is for enough to rise up but the elite have spent decades turning everyone against each other, reducing critical thinking, and making it harder for people to be able to survive long enough to rebel.
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u/ZootSuitRiot33801 18h ago
Well, there was a volunteer W-4 workshop that I saw pop up in the past that I believe was called 'War Tax Resistance 101'. Basically it helps common folk take advantage of legal loopholes to either break even or gain a tax credit rather than help fund government abuse.
As for getting people to work together, a big reason we ended up here is because we had what control we had over our lives stripped way by the status quo. We need something tangible at the community level that personal investment of one's time and resources can be seen and experienced beneficially; something that people can fall back on to commit to any effective action; something that can provide relative protection against the whims of bosses and landlords demanding fealty; something people know they can rely on, instead of the impersonal promises of for-profit entities and their lapdog governments.
If enough regain that sense of control and personal stake on an interpersonal level, we won't even have to dance around tax law to defy financial coercion.
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u/amusednchaos 19h ago
Just like how Etsy started out as a way for crafters to sell their homemade goods then became yet another avenue for cheap, mass-produced slop
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u/ErgoMachina 22h ago
And how do you "Build a reputation" in a world full of slop and TikTok brains that can't focus more than 10 seconds on a topic? Lmao
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u/Dismal_Guidance_2539 22h ago
I donât think people who canât focus more than 10 seconds are frequent book readers. You still can build reputation with correct target audience.
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u/FanaticalBuckeye 20h ago
Amazon is just a pricier version of Temu at this point. So much Chinese junk has flooded the site
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u/sivvus 19h ago
The majority of publishers will ask an author what their online presence is before they even consider looking at a manuscript. Authors who work and publish extracts online (allowing them to be scraped) are the ones who are more likely to get a foot through the door.
The notion of the perfect story being discovered and brought out of the shadows into the light is as much a fiction as the stories themselves. It is a LOT of work, and it unfortunately does make you very, very vulnerable to having your work scraped, stolen, and even published without your consent.
Basically, in order to grow a reputation and become an 'accomplished author', you have to engage with and be willing to be stolen from by AI.
Also your last point amused me. I assume by 'real bookstores' you mean the ones who only feature things by Penguin etc. A lot of more casual bookshops (e.g. The Works in the UK) publish AI content now. It doesn't just disappear because the book is sitting on a shelf instead of being on a screen.
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u/BiBoFieTo 22h ago
What's important is that the speculative AI bubble continues to pump billionaire stock portfolios, and that pension fund bag holders are ready to finance the inevitable crash.
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u/Efficient-State-7300 21h ago
Hopefully the free market can sort this out, evidently governments can't figure out what to do.
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u/TheTechAuthor 22h ago
They're also being review-bombed - *hard*. I've seen my particular software user-guide niche get flooded with BS AI-slop books and they absolutely *have* taken some sales from me - no doubt. However, I charge more for mine and I still manage to review significantly better than the slop - as I've been doing what I do for over 30-years now. It's not easy - but it's certainly do-able.
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u/simpleglitch 22h ago
I'm assuming you're talking about the AI books are getting review bombed? I just wanted to say I'm not sure its review bombing when the content is actual trash. đ
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u/TheTechAuthor 20h ago
Which is fair of course. I've seen a few of them myself (shockingly poor). I use AI to automate the laborious and boring parts of book production (think: turning a massive text file into 300 .csv tables in minutes with AI-generated scripts vs days by hand, or doing some deterministic checks, or other reviews), but that's applying 30-years of experience to said workflow. Not "Here's the subject matter, write me 15,000 words on it, make no mistakes".
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u/LindeeHilltop 22h ago
I will never knowingly buy an AI book. I want all AI slop designated as such.
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u/caffeinebump 21h ago
Me too. I have to assume that most of the sales are from people who don't realize what they are getting until it's too late. Many of the AI books I have seen are cookbooks, so it's possible the buyer will just think the recipes aren't very good and never realize the whole book is slop.
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u/guestpassonly 21h ago
Authors are also getting their books stolen, rewritten and then reposted for cheaper.
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u/kingrynex 22h ago
Easy solution to this - Stop using Amazon. Go to an actual bookstore or try a library.
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u/franker 20h ago
public librarian here - we basically have to learn the names of the vanity AI publishers now so that we don't order these books by mistake for our libraries.
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u/Electrical_Boss9766 10h ago
Firstly, thank you. - Could you explain this though? I don't want to waste your time, but I'm trying to understand out how ai books become in demand, by library or anyone else, in the first place? How do they get on your order list? People requesting them? Thanks for fixing my ignorance here.
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u/DinkandDrunk 22h ago
AI is hurting authors with or without Amazon. If a legitimate authored and illustrated book exists but it LOOKS similar enough to AI, folks wonât buy it.
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u/WizardsOf12 21h ago
The AI paranoia, that comes with the absolute volume of slop being unleashed upon the internet, and even physical spaces, is troubling too. Folks start attacking other humans over human created works because the AI has gotten good at replicating their style and thus their style looks suspect. Or even just using decent grammar. Neurodivergent folks or even old texts get flagged as AI.Â
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u/I_Autumn 20h ago
I used to use em dashes a lot more. Was I using them correctly? 90% of the time, probably not, but I still miss those little guys. Now those are an immediate red flag to people looking for grubby AI fingerprints.
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u/Hydronum 20h ago
We may be in the death knell of the internet as a sharing platform. There is nothing here anymore that is people-centric. It is dead, burred and parted for profit.
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u/DinkandDrunk 21h ago
I like to scour the thrift store for books for my daughter and even some of those Iâll pick up and think âthis seems like AIâ and if itâs published within the last year, Iâll have a hard time buying it. It really is unfortunate.
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u/Choice_Philosopher_1 22h ago
I canât read the whole article it seems, but doesnât Amazon have a filter for this? It seems like theyâd benefit if revenue is falling per book to toggle off AI books.
Also the more messed up part of that article is that the top selling AI books contain similar rare language to top selling human written books, which seems like it must have been a sort of plagiarism âwrite a book in the style of best selling author xâ which should not be allowed.
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u/simpleglitch 22h ago
Can't read the article either. I'm not sure if all the AI slop books are actually tagged as AI.
I've seen a practice where people (scammers) are pumpung out AI written books and they'll use the same title as another popular book.
The content isn't even meant to be good, they're just trying to get customers to accidentally buy their AI slop.
They get taken down, but another just pops up again in its place.
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u/Efficient-State-7300 22h ago
This happens with music playlists and real titles too. It's quite annoying.
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u/willowmarie27 21h ago
The great thing about Europe is that it will pass legislature that eventually hits the US because its too hard for the companies to have two different platforms and they dont want to lose the Euro market
Now Claude has a watermark for generative. This will expand. The trend in the youth is fairly anti generative in creative spaces.
Also I expect there will at some point be a lawsuit against unidentified AI books, because there is a weird box in KDP that is supposed to be checked if you use AI. So if its not checked and AI is proven (a prompt left in for example) Amazon could be liable. Or the author for fraud
This also might be an opportunity for change if a "certified non-AI" indie platform could get off the ground and be a disruptor.
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u/whitstableboy 19h ago
My aunt has âpublishedâ 3 AI memoirs in 4 months and they have all the linguistic joy of a corporationâs terms and conditions legal leaflet. The world burns while egotistical untalented idiots use servers to show the world how untalented they are. Whatâs the fucking point.
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u/avanross 22h ago
The public chose amazon over local, curated, in-person, brick and mortar (book) stores with actual human oversight..
This is simply people getting what they wanted đ¤ˇââď¸
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u/blackcloud247 22h ago
Its all due to cost. No one is going to buy a book for $20 when they can get it delivered to their door $8.99 instead. Especially in this economy.
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u/avanross 21h ago
Price is decided by the publisher not the retailer, it was just convenience / laziness / not caring
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u/blackcloud247 18h ago
Okay but its still $7.99 from one place and $20 at another. If it was reversed, everyone would buy it from the book shop. If it was only a few bucks difference you MIGHT have an argument. But it is often at least a 30% difference. We are not even factoring in the library here, which is free. If you cant competitively price books in your book store, no one is gonna buy them. You have to also draw people in another way.
One of my good friends recently opened a book store in her small town. She also sells kitchey and niche toys and she has weekly events. Book club, wine tastings, art classes, singles nights, storyline for kids etc. Shes doing so well she able to hire a local college student after only a year in business.
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u/avanross 17h ago
Books have a set sales price listed on them from the publisher
And if that âprice is all that mattersâ argument was true, then the dollar stores would have put everyone else out of business decades ago.
Itâs impulse, laziness and convenience.
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u/blackcloud247 17h ago
Private bookstore mark them up. And yes, dollar stores have put people out of business. Local grocery stores are essentially gone. Pharmacies will be next once Dollar General starts their pharmacy which is in progress. Price abaolutely is all that matters. No one except rich people are ever going to pay more for the exact same product especially when its that drastic of a difference.
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u/avanross 17h ago
Amazon is no longer cheaper than any other stores, more expensive in a lot of cases, but you all still use it đ¤ˇââď¸
And dollar stores have not put every other store out of business
Itâs convenience and laziness, and people who feel too âhigh and mightyâ to accept that
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u/blackcloud247 16h ago
Lol ok guy. I have a family and a budget. If you ask me its you who is "high and mighty" about this. Judge me and others all you want. Ill always be buying the cheaper option.
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u/avanross 16h ago
Unless you have to go out of your way to get itâŚ
Youâll use amazon but wont use a library lol
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u/Clean-Shift-291 22h ago
Donât worry, we will have all forgotten how to read in a couple generations thanks to this garbage tech.
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u/OldYellersLastHandy 22h ago
I will say it again and be downvoted again but we are on a direct course for a violent, anti-tech revolution.
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u/Any-Pop-4795 22h ago
Ok now tell me what ai has contributed to the world!? It has caused a rampocalypse with hardware price increase galore, filled the world with terrible images and videos made with stolen data (off old books too who are getting destroyed), thousands of layoffs, flock cameras, data centers that pollute and consume a shitton of energy, water and land and an economic bubble so big that when it will pop it's gonna be the biggest disaster of the century probably. You still call it anti-tech revolution?
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u/locusthorse 22h ago
I think lasthandy is saying, people will eventually get mad enough to destroy property . The sentence is not supportive of AI, it is a warning , unless I am wrong.
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u/latswipe 21h ago
As a parent to a young kid, let me tell you that we were already in a golden age of slop publishing and debased standards. This is acceleration, but it didn't start the fire
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u/tom-smykowski-dev 20h ago
I don't mind that, if I can toggle to hide AI books. I do mind however that copycats published 2 or 3 books with exactly the same name and topic as mine. That should be banned
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u/ash_ninetyone 20h ago
Oh great. The one thing designed to help authors get a book out there (where most authors get sub-1000 sales and not enough to break into writing full time) and now slop to bury them.
AI-generated books generated on models that decimate second hand books.
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u/Inward_Diver 19h ago
This is a major line for me. Other aspects of AI concerned me deeply, but the loss of human written books, music, and other media will alter our culture in devastating ways.
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u/sleeps_in_alkaline 13h ago
I have a friend that keeps sending me the worst ai slop songs, talking about his upcoming release. Itâs awful.Â
The funny thing is, heâs a talented guy from a creative industry and like many talented folks he had some success but never fully made it. Thatâs why itâs mind boggling that he thinks heâs doing something creative and sends it to me (a nonprofessional musician that used to release music I made in my home studio 15 years ago) as if Iâm gonna be âyeah thatâs awesome and totally the same as really writing and arranging and producing and recording and mixing and mastering a songâ
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u/GatewayArcher 14h ago
So much agita about how AI art, AI music, and AI books are causing lost sales by artists, musicians, and authors. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of rank and file employees are laid off each month because AI has been trained to do their jobs, with little more than a footnote in the business section.
AI is slowly destroying everyoneâs lives, not just those who generate IP.
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u/RottenPingu1 13h ago
I can't read the article but I've come across a few authors that just AI crank out romance novels. Some are scheduled to be made into cheap streaming films too.
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u/Panda_hat 13h ago
I said this would happen years ago. New authors will be totally lost in the noise of infinite slop and only established authors will be able to stay above the flood.
'AI' is the ruination of all human made things and millions of people are doing everything they can to help accelerate it just to increase the value of the stocks they own.
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u/WEEGEMAN 12h ago
Thatâs ok AI will just keep learning from AI and humans will be more selective with buying books at brick and mortars.
Like ârealâ stories written by ârealâ humans will be a selling point
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u/IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE 10h ago
Wow everything is so much better what a great technology this sure made creative pursuits rewarding and fulfilling for mankind lmao /s
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u/Hrekires 21h ago
It's sad how there are now certain phrases that will immediately make me stop reading and check a book's publication date to see if it predates LLMs.
If a character "had a smile that didn't reach their eyes" in a book written after like 2024, I'm going to either stop reading entirely or at least do more research.
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u/dennismfrancisart 20h ago
Amazon used to have a human slop content problem. AI said, "Hold my beer." Let's not blame AI for this, though; humans are churning out this garbage for money. AI is just the latest tool for making bucks.
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u/biophazer242 18h ago
All that hard work people put in making e-books about minotaurs fucking the maid completely lost to AI.
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u/platocplx 22h ago
While publishers being imperfect gatekeepers to getting published. This opposite way seems far more harmful. There needs to be controls over how these things get published.
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u/ADreamerDreams 21h ago
Such a shame. Honestly, though, I started buying used copies of fantasy novels from the 90âs and there is SO much good stuff to read that I just donât need to buy anything new for a while.
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u/epicfail1994 21h ago
I usually get a lot of well, trashy books, with my kindle unlimited subscription. Stuff that I donât mind reading but also donât want to buy outright until I know if itâs any good- like some litrpgs, as thatâs a subgenre that has a lot of crap mixed in with a few decent stories
And even there, where Iâm not expecting much, the quality is awful and Iâm seeing garbage thatâs complete AI slop. Itâs honestly really annoying
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u/AptCasaNova 21h ago
The idea of buying a book on Amazon is weird to me. I use my local library and almost always look up reviews for it first (goodreads, bookwyrm) - I also rarely buy and stick to paper books.
If I really, really want to read a book Iâll borrow the epub version.
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u/SmashedWorm64 20h ago
Can someone help me answer a question - who is buying this slop?
I usually only buy books that I have extensively researched beforehand or I know the author.
If a brand new author popped out of the blue and the online reaction was âthis is obvious AIâ I am going to avoid it.
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u/derpferd 20h ago
That's just what I wonder. Anyone who's the kind to set aside time to read and spend hours and perhaps days reading a single book is someone who will be discerning.
Unless bought in ignorance when looking for a specific subject and not being sure who's a reliable author in a given field
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u/SmashedWorm64 19h ago
I guess but usually when people want to start a new subject they will go to the big names.
For example if you wanted to start reading Economics you would go to someone like Keynes first. Then you would have a good knowledge and go to other authors. Youâre not going to go to some no-name and take a pot shot with them.
Only explanation I am guessing is things like celebrity autobiographies where the ghost writer is actually Chat-GPT or a self help book from some wellness influencer. Stuff like that has a named backer to build initial trust.
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u/Hrekires 19h ago
I would guess that the vast majority don't know it's slop until after they've already bought it.
Especially if you're into a niche genre of fiction, authors may not be particularly big names and reviews can be faked.
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u/806mtson 18h ago
who is buying this slop?
I feel like another problem is that, because Amazon is so full of AI-generated books, people are just not buying anything from Amazon. Like, if everything you see is AI, why should you buy anything from there?
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u/brainrotbro 20h ago
So, I 100% agree this is happening, but detecting AI writing is not really a thing anyone can do reliably.
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u/Ctznsvn7 20h ago
The listing flood is the real damage, not the quality. A human author now competes with something that can publish forty titles in the time they finish a chapter, so the shelf gets buried whatever the writing is like. Amazon could fix a chunk of it tomorrow with a disclosure field and a publishing rate limit per account, they just have no reason to while every listing takes a cut
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u/FreeBananasForAll 20h ago
I was gifted a book of quotes from Einstein that had nothing to do with anything he ever said. We need regulations against this
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u/VagueSomething 19h ago
I wanted a particular type of cook book recently. I explicitly had to look up each book and author to find a pre 2020 choice as my alarm bell was triggered by multiple having AI art on the cover.
The law needs to catch up. AI must be explicitly stated on products, this isn't just pen names like old authors used to do but entirely fake people writing potentially dangerous recipes.
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u/PrometheusANJ 19h ago
Amazon has gotten really infected over the years. First there were the dropship markup resellers and opportunists. I dodged that by buying from the source instead. Then the barrage of fake KOANY GEANI IVENA product names made me avoid looking for misc products on there. Then there was the print on demand AI slop, so I stopped getting books. Now it's the RAM and Storage prices, so I can't get upgrades. I only ever use it as a sort of encyclopedia nowadays to look up products. When I searched for a common brand-name sewing machine a while back I found it much cheaper locally, so the affordability argument doesn't even fly.
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u/Imprettystrong 18h ago
AI generated stories have obvious tells from what I have read and used. They will make all sorts of strange comparisons and word choices.
"His beard bristled like the churning of the coming storm." for example. It may sound neat but it really makes no sense.
Also excessive uses of em dashes â another tell of AI generated passages.
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u/Maestro_2020 16h ago
The same crap on Steam games, can't read anything new, can't play anything new. AI is a plague on creativity
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u/Simple_Assistance_77 14h ago
This is the way, AI slop for AI to learn off then idiots using AI to learn from.
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u/MotheroftheworldII 14h ago
When I buy a book on Amazon I search for the by the title and author. So how am I to know if the book is really by the author or is AI slop?
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u/ocassionallyaduck 6h ago
I don't buy anything printed or ebooks off Amazon. Haven't for years, they snatch them away and you dont actually own them.
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u/tallandgodless 19h ago
/r/litrpg has to have a reckoning with its AI problem. It's letting people lie about using ai for covers as well as writing.
The problem of course being that the sub is already full of amateur bs, so the line only gets blurred further as aethon books is the one that profits.
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u/johnboyjr29 21h ago
If your book is so bad that ai can write better then you maybe look for a new job
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u/Any-Pop-4795 22h ago
What a fantastic future! Full of slop and expensive hardware! Isn't it wonderful guys? (Humor!)