ChatGPT introduces boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon

• The book is available for $1 on Amazon’s Kindle e-book store.
• Now that ChatGPT is poised to upend the traditional book industry,
• ChatGPT learns to write by scanning millions of pages of previous content.

“The idea of writing a book finally seemed possible,” said Schickler, a salesman in Rochester, New York. “I thought, ‘I can do this.'”

Schickler built a 30-page illustrated children’s e-book in a couple of hours using AI software, which can generate blocks of text from simple instructions, and offered it for sale in January through Amazon.com Inc.’s self-publishing business.

In the edition, Sammy the Squirrel, crudely portrayed as also utilizing AI, learns about saving money from his forest pals after discovering a gold coin. He makes an acorn-shaped piggy bank, invests in an acorn trading company, and dreams of one day purchasing an acorn grinding stone.

Sammy becomes the wealthiest squirrel in the forest, much to the envy of his companions, and “the woodland started prospering,” according to the book.

“The Wise Little Squirrel: A Tale of Saving and Investing,” Schickler said the book, which is available in the Amazon Kindle store for $2.99 (or $9.99 for a printed version), has earned him less than $100. While this may not seem like much, it is enough to motivate him to write more books utilizing the program.

“I could see people making a whole career out of this,” said Schickler, who used ChatGPT suggestions such as “write a story about a dad teaching his son about financial literacy.”

Schickler is at the forefront of a movement testing the potential and limitations of ChatGPT, which launched in November and has shocked Silicon Valley and beyond with its astonishing ability to generate coherent blocks of text in real time.

As of mid-February, there were over 200 e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store with ChatGPT listed as an author or co-author, including “How to Write and Generate Content Using ChatGPT,” “The Power of Homework,” and the poetry collection “Echoes of the Cosmos.” And the figure is growing by the day. On Amazon, there is even a new sub-genre: books about using ChatGPT that are fully authored by ChatGPT.

Yet, because of the nature of ChatGPT and many writers’ failure to reveal their use of it, it is practically impossible to obtain an accurate tally of how many e-books may have been authored by AI.

The software’s growth has already rattled some of the biggest technological companies, pushing Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to rush out new AI-infused services in Google and Bing, respectively.

The quick consumer adoption of ChatGPT has sparked a frenzy in industry circles, with investors pouring money into AI-focused startups and giving technology firms new purpose in the midst of significant layoffs. Microsoft, for example, earned glowing attention for its normally dormant Bing search engine last month after showcasing a connection with ChatGPT.

Yet, there are already doubts about the legitimacy of ChatGPT, which learns to write by scanning millions of pages of previous content. CNET’s AI experiment resulted in many corrections and obvious plagiarism before the tech news site suspended its use.

Threat to “real” authors?

Now, ChatGPT is poised to upend the traditional book industry, as aspiring writers and self-help gurus eager to make a quick buck are turning to the software to help them build bot-made e-books and publish them through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing arm. Illustrated children’s books are popular among first-time authors. Hundreds of instructions detailing how to write a book in a few hours have sprung up on YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit. Get-rich-quick scams, nutrition advice, software development instructions, and recipes are among the topics covered.

“This is something we really need to be worried about; these books will flood the market, and a lot of authors are going to be out of work.” According to Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Writers Guild, Human ghostwriting has a long history, she says, but the potential to automate through AI might change book writing from a talent to a commodity.

“There needs to be transparency from the authors and the platforms about how these books are created, or you’re going to end up with a lot of low-quality books,” she added.

One author, going by the pen name Frank White, demonstrated in a YouTube video how he authored a 119-page novella called “Galactic Pimp: Vol. 1” in less than a day about alien groups in a far-off galaxy fighting for a human-staffed brothel. The book is available for $1 on Amazon’s Kindle e-book store. In the video, White claims that anyone with the means and time could produce 300 such books per year using AI.

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Several authors, including White, believe they have no obligation to disclose in the Kindle store that their great American work was written entirely by a machine, partly because Amazon’s regulations do not require it. “All books in the store must adhere to our content guidelines, including intellectual property rights and all other applicable laws,” confirmed Lindsay Hamilton, an Amazon spokesman, via email.