AI has made huge leaps lately, and more and more people are starting to use it to do things they don't have the real-life skill to do - like writing books. It was only a matter of time, really, but AI-generated books have now been flooding Amazon, even making it onto the Kindle top 100 best-seller list.
This is because the Kindle Direct Publishing program makes it easy for any individual to self-publish books on the Amazon platform. So, people with an entrepreneurial spirit have been using the likes of ChatGPT to write books for them and then uploading them directly to Amazon.
Indie author Caitlyn Lynch took to Twitter to point out that of the top 100 books published in the Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance category, only 19 of them were actually legitimately written and published by human beings.
Most of these books are also being entered into the Kindle Unlimited program, which allows readers to pay a monthly fee to read anything in its catalogue - which is great if it isn't swamped with AI trash.
A TechRadar report on the topic suggests that Amazon has now taken many of these AI-written books down. "We have clear content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale and promptly investigate any book when a concern is raised. We invest heavily to provide a trustworthy shopping experience and to protect customers and authors from abuse," an Amazon rep told TechRadar.
As AI becomes more and more mainstream, we're going to start seeing more practices like this, and companies are going to have to stay on top of these issues if they don't want their services to become devoid of all creativity.