Unsurprisingly, the editorial possibilities offered by conversational agents, ChatGPT in mind, have opened a Pandora’s box: books written by AI. Reuters, which first seized on the subject, has spotted hundreds of e-books sold on Amazon. Some are just opportunistic guides to using ChatGPT, but others are entirely ChatGPT-made stories — at least from the data that feeds it. As of mid-February, Amazon’s Kindle catalog listed over 200 e-books listing ChatGPT as an author or co-author.
A phenomenon also present on French platforms
By simply looking “ChatGPT” on the Amazon search engine, there are indeed many young works referring to the OpenAI chatbot. For example, a post titled The ChatGPT AI Guide – User Manual – ChatBot: everything you need to know about conversational artificial intelligence is published by a certain Max Tremblay with the mention “and ChatGPT 3”. The book is offered at €4.95 in Kindle format, and even around €10 in paper version.
Another French-speaking author, Léo Raphaël Pineda, offers several books on ChatGPT, including a ChatGPT for Dummies: A Complete Guide to Using AI. In paperback, this book is sold for more than 16 €, but the opinions are generally negative about it. While most of the books featured on Amazon are user- and business-oriented, some also publish (more or less) historical titles such as Hope in Adversity: The Story of David Fellow and the French Resistanceor for children such as Tim’s Adventure in the Comfort Zoneeven incorporating designs made by Midjourney.
There are also some electronic books written by ChatGPT on French platforms, such as Fnac, with several dozen references where ChatGPT appears as author or co-author. These are sometimes collections of poems, recipe books or books for students. It doesn’t seem obligatory for authors to mention ChatGPT and some books written using AI may well fly under the radar.
The concern of the world of the book
“It’s something we really have to worry about. These books will flood the market and many authors will be out of work.said Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the group of writers The Authors Guild, interviewed by Reuters. ghost writing (ghost writing) by humans has a long tradition, but the ability to automate via AI could turn writing into a commodity. There needs to be transparency from authors and platforms about how these books are created, otherwise you’re going to end up with a lot of shoddy titles.”
The speed of production is impressive. Reuters mentions a 119-page short story published by a certain Frank White and written in less than a day. The news agency estimates that he could create 300 such books a year, all via AI.
Asked by Reuters, Amazon did not say whether it plans to change its Kindle store policy regarding authors’ use of AI or other automated writing tools. “All books in the store must follow our content guidelines, including respecting intellectual property rights and all other applicable laws”was limited to answering the spokesperson for Amazon, Lindsay Hamilton, by email.
The book market is not the only market with some reason to be concerned about the emergence of these editorial AIs, although they are for the moment quite quickly overtaken by bad reviews from readers. So far, journalists from Digital have not yet been replaced by ChatGPT — which would not displease some people — but the world of the press also has good reason to watch these chatbots out of the corner of their eye…