Amazon fills up with books written by ChatGPT

Aspiring writers who do not want to spend time and effort creating their own literary masterpiece. access ChatGPT looking for help.

Several recent reports show how the AI-powered OpenAI chatbot is already featured as a co-author of over 200 books in the self-publishing section of Amazon’s online bookstore. And these are only those where ChatGPT is specified.

For example, Brett Sheekler from New York recently used ChatGPT to create a 30-page book called Wise little squirrel which teaches children to save and invest.

“The idea of ​​writing a book is finally a possibility,” said Reiter Shikler, a day salesman. “I thought, ‘I can do this.'”

While Schickler used text hints for ChatGPT to generate the blocks of text he used to create the story, he also used AI-based text-to-image generators to generate the images, though Reuters describes the images as “roughly rendered”.

After only a few hours of work, Shikler made his book available on the Amazon Kindle store for $2.99 ​​(e-book) or $9.99 (print). However, it has not yet become a bestseller, as its author has only managed to earn $100 so far.

The apparent ease with which ChatGPT can be used to create books has already resulted in numerous tutorial videos on YouTube explaining how to do it. Publishing is also easy with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) service, which provides all the tools you need to get started at virtually no cost.

AI-based technologies like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are clearly making a huge difference to the creative industries as well. While the quality of a chatbot’s output can be questionable in terms of quality when it comes to creating a complex novel, it will only get better over time, a prospect that will alarm authors and illustrators who put a lot of effort into creating pieces. values.

However, for the time being, those using ChatGPT to create books need to tread carefully, as plagiarism can be a problem. This is because the OpenAI chatbot learns by scanning millions of pages of text on the web, some of which may end up in the books it is asked to create.

The situation is already causing problems for established industry players as well, as sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld notes a rapid increase in AI-written content. While Clarkesworld typically receives about 10 submissions per month that it believes to be plagiarized, the advent of ChatGPT has seen that figure rise to 100 per month, according to a Guardian report.

“Obviously business as usual is not going to be sustainable and I am concerned that this path will lead to more barriers for new and international authors; Shorts need these people,” founding editor Neil Clarke wrote on his blog, adding, “This won’t go away on its own and I don’t have a solution.”

The situation has become so difficult for Clarkesworld that on Monday it stopped accepting submissions until further notice.

As for Amazon, KDP’s terms of use don’t mention the use of AI-generated content, so at least for now, we can expect more of their book listings to be populated with such material.