Writing a good book requires massive creativity, dedication, and years of literary efforts. But today, authors are completing books in a few hours, thanks to AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Authors are spamming Kindle Books using ChatGPT. This concerns people who belong to the literary ecosystem. They are worried about the originality and quality of AI-generated books.
Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing makes it easy to publish and market books without involving literary agents or publishers. Launched in 2007, the self-publishing platform has led to the explosion of self-publishing and the decline of physical bookstores. But ChatGPT could cost Amazon its reputation with readers who prefer actual books written by real authors over AI content.
Amazon releases more than 1.4 million self-published books every year, and this accounts for 31% of total e-book sales on the platform. The ChatGPT-enabled ability to write books within hours and the Amazon-enabled ability to publish books instantly without any oversight has attracted many authors worldwide. This could result in hyper-personalized articles as well as more manipulation and misinformation about things, although efforts are being made to help publishers fight misinformation.
Reuters, a leading news agency, reports that some of the AI-generated books are plagiarized, while others require multiple corrections. Critics argue that these books are diluting the true value of books, and it’s like deceiving readers who may assume that they’re buying books written by human authors. They also highlight the importance of rigorous editorial oversight and quality control.
Key Issues
Margaret Mitchell, the chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face, says the ChatGPT-generated books or content may not be grounded in reality. And it’s challenging to trace made-up things back to reality.
Another issue is copyrighting. According to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, computer-generated content can be copyrighted if a computer generates them in situations such that there is no human author of the work. But, as mentioned above, determining original sources of AI-generated books can be difficult.
Making the matter even more complicated, it’s legal for AI developers to leverage text and data mining (TDM) for non-commercial reasons. But users must ensure that their content usage doesn’t violate laws.
So, we can say that AI-created books might end Kindle’s monopoly unless it’s regulated or recognized as an entirely different category.
Navkiran Dhaliwal is a seasoned content writer with 10+ years of experience. When she's not writing, she can be found cooking up a storm or spending time with her dog, Rain.