If I can write a query into Amazon for a book on topic X, I can write that query into ChatGPT or whatever and cut out the middleman.
Some of this may work in the short term while some people still equate the format “book” with “went through a rigorous process”.
That erosion was underway before AI (e.g. on Amazon I instinctually ignore any self-published Kindle books), but I can’t imagine this will last.
I think/hope the market will somehow make human-written books easy to recognize.
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.
This is a workflow problem.
What the LLM normally needs:
- very basic outline: what the story is about
- basic cast of characters: like fiction/plays of the 18-1900s
Then you go chapter-by-chapter. But the most critical thing is that you MUST provide the chapter beats. From start to end. Location, environment, events, any critical conversations. For a chapter that is 2-3K words, this chapter outline often becomes 2-400 words or more. Because you have the story in your head, you can handle the stuff that the LLM is likely to screw up.
There are ways to build a system where the LLM can keep track of many things, but then that becomes programming, which is just as boring.
To add to this, in my 9-5 I work as a designer. Colleagues in other parts of the business sometimes come to us with stuff they have created using AI tools. To a layman they look really good, but if you know what to look for you can spot the issues.
At this point in time my opinion is that any AI generated thing is great at making fools of the unaware, or those who are not looking at something critically. It can create something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but on closer inspection it's not a duck.
But it doesn't feel good. At the moment it feels scary. Crossing my fingers we get through this somehow.
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.
Problem is short of filtering out anything published after 2023 it’s almost impossible to find something that isn’t slop now.
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.
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...
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.
Can you please provide sources for this? My understanding is that he used the expression "I appreciate the pushback" in a context in which it made sense (responding to criticism), and people flagged that it sounded LLM-like.
There’s some poetry seeing people complaining about how LLM provide unreliable information in a confident tone, who then go on to share incorrect information in a confident tone.
You need a mechanism to filter out the crud. There are many, some better than others.
That's very interesting, and not as dramatic a dilution as I'd expected over the period (2023 - 26), or even close to as dramatic an increase in overall number of titles (achieving a sale) as I expected.
This sample is limited to what the study's authors have defined as "self-published genre fiction", which isn't representative of the market as a whole, and has very different economics compared to, for example, fiction titles published by "Big 5" publishers.
Whether the sales of non-self-published books are potentially being diluted is an interesting question, because it will tell us slightly more about where those AI sales might be coming from. I'd like to know unit and revenue numbers for non-self-published titles for the same period, in the same Amazon categories - on the off-chance anyone here has BookScan access and that's something you can pull.
Overall, though, this seems like a relatively optimistic result. If the economics don't work in the longer-term - the dilution effect ends up not being worth the token cost & labour, unless you can "hit" relatively reliably - we'll end up with less slop, put out by slop-auteurs running book farms, which I think is a fine outcome.
This is not without precedent by any stretch - the only meaningfully new part of that would be the writing mechanism. It strikes me as a possible eventual equilibrium that's both realistic and makes logical sense.
Putting aside the AI-fiction panic, and "the novel is dead" hyperbolics (which is something that's been said about as long as novels have existed), it probably will settle around a % of low-budget genre fiction being slop - as it always has been.
It feels a little patronising to suggest readers looking for anything more "serious" will be seduced and have their sales diluted by mass-produced LLM outputs. Readers deserve more credit than that, I hope.
But it looks, to me, really hard to read anything directionally on that at all, especially without equivalent numbers on titles from actual publishers.
The book retail in my city is thriving, and consists mainly of shops where the owners curate the 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.
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.
Just give me the prompt at this point.
Some HR systems even support that and have AI writing/rewording integrated.
Corporate hellscapes intensifying, I guess.
It's both a new technology that maps a geometry to existing language - which is very interesting from several literary theory POVs - and represents a new kind of typewriter. If you're interested in innovative techniques in fiction, I think LLMs are arguably deeply interesting. Mass-producing slop, however, is probably quite limited in terms of its theoretical interest, and in how it changes the craft.
Personally, an example of how I use gen AI when writing is that I sometimes use a little text editor I wrote. It polls a local model, and grabs the 50 most-likely next token(s), rounded to one word, based on where the cursor is.
"Voice" in fiction was already about how the author chooses to deviate from the expected-next-word. So - while you could just use the tokens returned - I find myself using them much more often to choose what words to avoid using, or how to deviate from the expected outputs, and where it might be most interesting to do that.
I think there's plenty of interesting things that can be done with gen AI in terms of fiction writing, but I think we're quite a long way from working all of them out yet. Wholesale slop generation is one of the most obvious - and most boring - things writers can do with an LLM.
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)
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.
I think and write the outline for a chapter. Then I have the LLM produce it. I read the draft. Tweak things. Reroll. Take the best from multiple rolls and merge them to produce a organic whole. Manually patch the minor differences in pacing and tone.
Rinse and repeat.
It takes 100-250 hours across 3-4 months to produce a story. But I drop 99.9% of the stuff within the first day or two because the plot or characters do not work.
I use the web front end directly. Let's me switch between any model including Gemma 4 running locally.
Is it even feasible to filter this? Such metadata can be easily faked too in a lot of contexts.
That is where expectations differ I guess.
Perhaps for some uses (say a summary of some business document, or generating code which is then discarded or edited) that's acceptable. For literature, do you really feel they are useful tools? So many changes would be required IMO that you're better off just writing the story you want to tell.
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.
Personally I prefer stunningly good over exclusively human created.
Clearly the editor didn't think it was stunningly good, or they wouldn't have flagged it up.
To the extent that their reviewers get lazy and are not reading entire texts, as evidenced by this slipping through and then being caught by an editor (who did read the whole thing).
So no, this does not prove your point.
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.