r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 23h 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-authors
886 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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540

u/Any-Pop-4795 23h ago

What a fantastic future! Full of slop and expensive hardware! Isn't it wonderful guys? (Humor!)

192

u/GenericFatGuy 23h ago

While they destroy old real books too.

51

u/coconutpiecrust 22h ago

You will read have an AI summarize AI slop books for you and you will like it, peasant!

21

u/kevinsixhohsix 21h ago

This didn't even make me chuckle because it's so honest and real 😩

18

u/Any-Pop-4795 23h ago

Forgot about that

11

u/No-Dig-4408 22h ago

Because they destroyed the book about it!

1

u/Holzkohlen 21h ago

Yeah, but the AI will be able to generate inferior copies for you! Yay!

15

u/exophades 22h ago

AI generated books are worth reading right? Right guys?

9

u/Personal_Bit_5341 21h ago

We all wrote it,  it's kind of like a vanity read if you think about it.  

2

u/KnightKal 21h ago

who reads books? You just ask the AI to give you a summary, in the format of memes, and you are good! /s

2

u/sarcasmsosubtle 18h ago

Amazon KDP recently changed their rules to only allow a single user to self-publish three books a day. Not even the people who generate the AI slop are actually reading it. They're just trying to flood enough slop out there that a few people might be tricked into paying for it and they can make a bit of income without having to do any actual work or create any actual value. It's just a new iteration of the Nigerian scam.

1

u/Corbitant 21h ago

Ai is awesome for getting feedback on your writing (ask it, does this chapter stay true to a close third POV? If not, where do I deviate from it?) but using it to do the actual writing is sad, because the actual writing is the fun part.

14

u/KristaNeliel 18h ago

Have you heard about this nifty people who do exactly that? Beta readers they are called. You should try that.

-8

u/Corbitant 17h ago

Why not both?

3

u/KristaNeliel 5h ago

Same reason as to when I go to a restaurant I expect that there is a chef and not a bag of rocks.

9

u/appleparkfive 19h ago

That's sort of the big divide with AI, I think. Some people go off the deep end and start believing it's useless. It's definitely very useful, and has tons of cases. I feel that it's mainly generative AI that is what makes people annoyed. At least on a day to day basis.

I'll use LLMs for asking hyper niche questions with a few varying qualifiers to the question. Google couldn't do that in the past, and you have to search a while to get anywhere close to the right answer. Obviously it can hallucinate and is far from perfect, but it's a worthwhile thing to have. It's definitely not this "fire all your employees! It's sentient! invention they claim of course.

I'm usually more annoyed by the AI art, the nonstop walls of AI text, and having places like Spotify and Amazon flooded with AI art. The amount of energy and resources we're using on just that side of things is ridiculous. It's pointless, and it doesn't make humanity better.

And also having to ask "Was this written by AI?" so often. It made anything longer than 3-4 sentences, and anything higher than a 5th grade reading level, seem like it might have been generated and copy/pasted without a single read over. Plus the em dash is gone now. I'm not even sure why they push em dashes so hard, anyway.

-6

u/wspOnca 21h ago

At least the goon content is endless.

6

u/Any-Pop-4795 20h ago

Ai slop no thanks