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.
The problem is not about money it is that we are made massively culturally poorer by the flood of ahistorical, amoral, incoherent, rococco, contradictory yet plausible shit produced by LLMs.
Both the internet and books have been flooded with ‘content’ which appears like human content but has no coherence or intention to it and tends to fall apart completely the longer form the story.
Even our autocomplete is being infected with LLM suggestions, distorting and guiding how people write.
This is a VERY significant problem for our culture long term.
I don’t see any other way past this other than regulation:
We need authenticated online spaces where your account is linked to a real, government issued ID. This way, moderating content becomes feasible again. Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time. I predict people will gravitate towards authenticated markets (and social media).
I for one am sick and tired of second guessing every text I‘m reading, at least give me someone to hold accountable.
Or maybe we just collectively impose severe social sanction on people trying to pass off low effort slop as their own work and stop calling it ‘artificial intelligence’?
> Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time.
People will just flood to places that are not official and where they'll be able to express their views freely. That's how these things have always turned out to be.
In other words, let's say that I'll get banned from the likes of FB or IG as a result of me trespassing my government's ideological wishes, well, tough luck for FB and IG (and fuck them while I'm at it), I'll just make an account on a platform that won't abide by EU/Romanian (I'm Romanian myself) propaganda, where I'll still be able to share views with people thinking similar thoughts to what I think.
the market they analyse is specifically self-published fiction. Most of the traditionally published books are not AI generated and they make significantly more money as a category than self publishing does. It is not really possible to flood that market in this form with 0 entry barriers.
So yes, allowing AI slop in a market where anyone can publish anything and quality is not a very strict criteria, of course it will dillute the market. But we are unlikely to see this shift in traditional publishing houses.
So a book that was “stunningly good, everyone fell in love with it. It’s a book that appeals to absolutely everyone.” now won't be published because AI was used to create it?
Personally I prefer stunningly good over exclusively human created.
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.
This is a surprise: Books with no AI text lose the most ground in genres with high AI diffusion, and most of all where Kindle Unlimited availability is high. Great to know this about creativity.
The market for books has been flooded far before AI. Millions of books are published each year, many more self published and unpublished. Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crud) predates AI by many decades.
You need a mechanism to filter out the crud. There are many, some better than others.
The overwhelming majority of content on Youtube is also plagued by AI.
You're 6 minutes in a documentary about Russo-Ottoman wars and only then you start noticing something's wrong, paintings are made up, the voice sounds similar to voices of other videos and the script has an odd non-human character to it.
Then you dig into it, and indeed it's a bunch of crap prompts glued together on top of some lame ai-generated internet research.
Prominent and formerly good youtuber Hank Green was just caught reading an AI script. He just read out something like "You're right to push back on this. If you'd like, I can reword this..." and didn't even flinch, didn't edit the sentence out, because his brain has been rotted by AI use.
I think it is just natural end of certain type of creators. They start as single person, slowly get maybe small team to help with filming and editing. And then when you need to keep producing content the script writers come. And now they are just face reading whatever is given to them. And then well there is to speed up the slowest part of process script and custom art. AI enters to this. And now they are already too far gone to care.
It's funny cause on the embedded youtube app they show you like 30 second clip and in about 10-15 seconds AIsm makes it pretty clear it's just going to be a grating voice over with horrible prose.
I hate these headlines. It's not generative ai that floods the market for books. It's people using Generative AI to flood the market. It's always the same something gets attributed to technology while it's people doing it. Scrutinize the people not the technology.
I wonder if this spells the end for online bookshops. I can imagine that small bookshops – or even online bookshops that focus primarily on selling curated books – are the future.
The book retail in my city is thriving, and consists mainly of shops where the owners curate the books.
all global text-for-money marketplaces (books, newsletters, onlyfans chats, etc.) will soon require ID verification to participate, or otherwise, substantial proof that there is a human in there somewhere
To the point you have to wonder if the reduced reading for pleasure levels in many places are due to understandably not being able to tell what is worth reading, especially given the enthusiasm the modern book industry has for promoting absolutely uninspiring crap.
Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?
It’s easier than actually writing, which is very hard to do well; authors spend years working on books.
Doesn’t really matter what the original motivation was (money, reputation, fame), people will use LLMs as a shortcut to generate text, and we’re all poorer because of it.
I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy.
The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in the bronze age."
I have found that a 1:4 to 1:8 ratio gives nice results. That is, for every 4-8 paras of expected output, you must provide 1 para worth of character detail, plot beats etc. So you would need 100-200 pages of your own writing to produce 800 pages worth.
A bunch of ideas doesn't make a book. Actual writing takes place, the length of each sentence, the specific choice of words, the pace, the choices, the editing. It's literally an art. Nobody wants to read what ChatGPT wrote based on your prompts.
Of course you can use it to quickly try out stuff, for some editorial tasks and such. But unless you learn the craft of writing I don't think others will want to read any of this stuff.
I have read thousands of books in my lifetime. I don't really have too many hobbies outside of reading. Trust me when I say there is an audience for literal crap. LLMs actually raise the bar significantly. I do not think they will ever exceed Hugo, or TS Eliot, or Borges, but they are far superior to the random author publishing random crap every single day.
Can the writer use AI to improve their output ... is the only outstanding question.
> It's literally an art.
So was making clothes, or shoes, or cabinets, or knives, or cooking, or so many other things. Now we mass produce all of them.
People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly has the same plots, character archetypes and other tropes found in other fiction. We think there is something special about human writing. But LLMs have read the same stuff we have. And produce similar inspired writing.
I mean, you’re right in a way that motifs, stylistic devices and archetypes recur in fiction, and that an LLM could produce similarly inspired texts – so what? That’s no reason not to write yourself – unless you don’t enjoy writing and just want some sort of result, some sort of product. And you sound as though you don’t actually enjoy writing, but would still like to produce a book. But why bother at all if you don’t enjoy writing? Writing as a hobby carries no stakes that would in any way justify the use of LLMs. There is nothing that needs to be optimised in order to produce value.
Think of it this way. You like well-designed houses. Like looking at them, living in them. So you design a house per your liking having bought a plot overlooking a stream and a meadow. And you hire someone to build it for you. You may not enjoy the actual process of building, but you do like living in the final product, right?
It is the same with books. Reading a story based on a plot of your design, and characters you built, dealing with situations you conceived of, and having conversations you directed works for me ... even if an LLM assisted with the writing duties.
Frankly the amount of books available from before LLM is staggering. The supply will long outlive me. So why would I buy any AI generated one? That is unless it starts producing something really good. Until that happens I suspect there is no real market for AI books.
Oh and btw amount of human generated crap is also so great that I has long became a problem for me to find good thing in that sea.
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.
Both the internet and books have been flooded with ‘content’ which appears like human content but has no coherence or intention to it and tends to fall apart completely the longer form the story.
Even our autocomplete is being infected with LLM suggestions, distorting and guiding how people write.
This is a VERY significant problem for our culture long term.
We need authenticated online spaces where your account is linked to a real, government issued ID. This way, moderating content becomes feasible again. Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time. I predict people will gravitate towards authenticated markets (and social media).
I for one am sick and tired of second guessing every text I‘m reading, at least give me someone to hold accountable.
People will just flood to places that are not official and where they'll be able to express their views freely. That's how these things have always turned out to be.
In other words, let's say that I'll get banned from the likes of FB or IG as a result of me trespassing my government's ideological wishes, well, tough luck for FB and IG (and fuck them while I'm at it), I'll just make an account on a platform that won't abide by EU/Romanian (I'm Romanian myself) propaganda, where I'll still be able to share views with people thinking similar thoughts to what I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY
Problem is short of filtering out anything published after 2023 it’s almost impossible to find something that isn’t slop now.
Is it even feasible to filter this? Such metadata can be easily faked too in a lot of contexts.
So yes, allowing AI slop in a market where anyone can publish anything and quality is not a very strict criteria, of course it will dillute the market. But we are unlikely to see this shift in traditional publishing houses.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/31/crime-novel-de...
Personally I prefer stunningly good over exclusively human created.
You need a mechanism to filter out the crud. There are many, some better than others.
The overwhelming majority of content on Youtube is also plagued by AI.
You're 6 minutes in a documentary about Russo-Ottoman wars and only then you start noticing something's wrong, paintings are made up, the voice sounds similar to voices of other videos and the script has an odd non-human character to it.
Then you dig into it, and indeed it's a bunch of crap prompts glued together on top of some lame ai-generated internet research.
The book retail in my city is thriving, and consists mainly of shops where the owners curate the books.
Now it’s easier than ever. So the market explodes. But it makes legit writers harder to find. Its bleak.
Doesn’t really matter what the original motivation was (money, reputation, fame), people will use LLMs as a shortcut to generate text, and we’re all poorer because of it.
And even at that point, others will continue to write using AI to simulate being one of those people.
The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in the bronze age."
I have found that a 1:4 to 1:8 ratio gives nice results. That is, for every 4-8 paras of expected output, you must provide 1 para worth of character detail, plot beats etc. So you would need 100-200 pages of your own writing to produce 800 pages worth.
But most people are lazy. So the output is too.
Of course you can use it to quickly try out stuff, for some editorial tasks and such. But unless you learn the craft of writing I don't think others will want to read any of this stuff.
Can the writer use AI to improve their output ... is the only outstanding question.
> It's literally an art.
So was making clothes, or shoes, or cabinets, or knives, or cooking, or so many other things. Now we mass produce all of them.
Just give me the prompt at this point.
People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly has the same plots, character archetypes and other tropes found in other fiction. We think there is something special about human writing. But LLMs have read the same stuff we have. And produce similar inspired writing.
It is the same with books. Reading a story based on a plot of your design, and characters you built, dealing with situations you conceived of, and having conversations you directed works for me ... even if an LLM assisted with the writing duties.
Some HR systems even support that and have AI writing/rewording integrated.
Corporate hellscapes intensifying, I guess.
Now you can do it in minutes, get 50 books out, 20 of them sell 10 copies, you've earned $200.
(i might be exaggerating the times and earnings, but the point stands)
Oh and btw amount of human generated crap is also so great that I has long became a problem for me to find good thing in that sea.