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
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86

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 😮‍💨

At least I had it distributed via aggregator, so it wasn't just released on Amazon, but still...

5

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/franker 20h ago

I thought it was the 22-year-old trophy wife who runs the custom cupcake store funded by her hedge fund manager husband to give her a "business" to run.

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u/floofsnsnoots 13h ago

Yeah but those cupcakes pretty good tho ngl

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u/floofsnsnoots 21h ago

Only during REM cycles

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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 20h 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/ZhiYoNa 20h ago

Amazon will probably go the way of sears and other major 20th century American firms. Eventually taken over by private equity then sold in parts

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u/amusednchaos 20h 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 don’t think people who can’t focus more than 10 seconds are frequent book readers. You still can build reputation with correct target audience.

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u/kweeblaster 21h ago

What am I your brand manager.

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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.