Book publishing has become another industry shaken by advances in artificial intelligence. Resourceful users use the publicly available chatbot ChatGPT to “write” books on a variety of topics and sell them on Amazon – with the entire process from idea to finished product within a matter of hours, writes Reuters.
Currently, over 200 books on the trading platform officially list ChatGPT as a co-author, but there are likely many more titles “written” by AI – there is no requirement for users to indicate that a bot helped them write.
From the idea to the book – in a few hours
There are already whole “guides” on social networks – how to get a sufficient amount of text of decent quality on any topic in a few hours and with a sufficient number of queries to the artificial intelligence.
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It is enough to simply ask, for example, “an article with tips on the maintenance of flowers at home in winter in 1200 words” and we already have a chapter of our book. 15-20 more inquiries about tricks when preparing winter food, protecting the garden from pests, delicious baked goods with a maximum of 5 ingredients, etc. and we now have material ready for a book aimed at housewives.
Source: Yavor Nikolov / Open Journey
Children’s books are also quite easy to create, and for them there are even cheap or free AI platforms that can provide the illustrations. ChatGPT has also been used for love advice, healthy eating, coaching and all sorts of other similar topics that mainstream and cheap books are written on.
Some more daring ones even publish novels and collections of poems.
A real career
“I can see how it could become a real career for someone,” Rochester, New York salesman Brett Shikler told Reuters. He himself “authored” a book about Sammy the squirrel, who learns smart investing after finding a gold coin. He said the 30-page illustrated children’s edition was ready after a few hours of “conversation” with ChatGPT and now sells for $2.99 in electronic format or $9.99 in paper.
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All this is possible with the help of the Kindle Direct Publishing platform, which enables anyone to sell their books on Amazon. It has been operating since 2007 and skips publishers and agents, helping more inexperienced authors or those whose works do not attract the attention of the big book publishing business.
Source: Yavor Nikolov / Open Journey
For years, however, Direct Publishing has also been used to distribute poorly written or literally copied books, but whose descriptions have been made to rank higher in search. Until now, however, this required a certain investment – for example, for the “piecemeal” payment of some author in India through Fiverr, while ChatGPT has a full-featured free version.
The biggest problem comes when using AI for anything other than fiction – the AI writes connected sentences but has no way of “knowing” whether they contain true information. That is why there is a great risk that some of his “advice” will turn out to be wrong or even dangerous.
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“We should be really worried about this. These books will flood the market and many authors will be out of a job,” said Authors Guild Executive Director Marie Rosenberger. There’s a long tradition of using “shadow writers,” she says, but AI automation is turning the craft into a cheap commodity.
Source: Yavor Nikolov / Open Journey
Some of the more successful “samizdat” authors on Amazon, such as Mark Dawson, who claims to have sold millions of his books, do not share AI concerns. According to him, reader recommendations are a major factor in the success of a title, and since ChatGPT writes “boring”, his creations will inevitably crash in the charts.
The illustrations for this article were made using the AI application Open Journey
