Who better than Georges Simenon wrote at breathtaking speed? “I still wonder today how, since the time of The OstrogothI was able to write six novels per year for Gallimard despite my travels across Europe and the five continents”he admitted. Since the recent invention and relatively simple handling of generative artificial intelligence (AI) – which creates text according to given instructions – the author of the “Maigret” series, who had nevertheless managed the feat of publishing his living several hundred works, finds itself largely outdated.
The surge of pseudo-authors who publish hundreds of works entirely produced by AI has become, over the months, such a phenomenon that Amazon has resolved to try to stem it. To limit abuse, the multinational reduced the number of publications authorized by the same author to three titles per day. This threshold, specifies the group, may be subject to subsequent adjustments, if necessary. This quota seems staggering since a writer generally needs a good year to finish their manuscript. A sign that these are “false books” generated by AI.
Amazon specifies: « Our content policies on Kindle Direct Publishing [KDP, sa plate-forme d’autoédition de livres électroniques et physiques] now require authors and publishers to indicate whether their work was generated by artificial intelligence”, whether it is text, images or translation. On the other hand, if the work was simply “assisted” by an AI to modify, improve or correct errors in the text or images, or even to search for and generate ideas while the author wrote the text, it does not There is no need to reveal the use of such tools. A complex nuance to say the least to verify.
Explosion in the number of writing assistance software
Amazon banned “content generated by artificial intelligence contravenes our rules”including that “which creates a disappointing customer experience”. A vague name that Amazon does not explain, limiting itself to promising: “We remove books that violate our rules. » Without saying, again, how many works have been excluded from KDP, which puts 10 million French-language titles on sale.
In February, the Reuters agency already listed more than two hundred works on KDP in the United States written by ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot. Both novels and technical manuals or children’s books. Brett Schickler, an American salesman based in Rochester (New York State), cited by Reuters, asked the AI to write him a 30-page children’s story, Sammy the Squirrel, which he sold for 2.99 dollars (2.77 euros) in digital media and 9.99 dollars in paper version. The author recovers 70% of the price of books sold.
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