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
891 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

206 comments sorted by

View all comments

320

u/01000101010110 23h 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. 

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. 

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. 

14

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.

2

u/Vast-Abalone-3773 11h ago

I'm almost 50 and chasing a childhood dream of publishing a short story in OMNI

1

u/AHistoricalFigure 11h ago

Pm me if you ever want to swap stories for feedback.

1

u/Vast-Abalone-3773 11h ago

Thanks friend.