Amazon and Goodreads must take steps to combat the flood of AI-generated content that will mislead readers and damage author reputations.
I see no problem with AI-generated books existing, but as is the case for any books it has to be possible to review them and evaluate their quality in the proper context.
I used to be a pretty active Goodreads librarian but that site has really gone downhill over the years. It had potential but it’s been largely squandered. Been thinking of looking into Bookwyrm but I’m worried it’s actually good and will suck all my free time away again.
It becomes a problem, if a) the market gets flooded with these things. Especially if they are pushed by a bot cartel and b) known, real author names are used, in order to increase the impact.
As long as their quality can be evaluated I don’t see the problem here, people won’t buy the crappy ones. That’s the main reason why there’s a problem with them reusing an existing author’s name, it makes evaluating the quality harder.
But who evaluates all those books? AIs can pump out thousands of books a day and the fake reviews pumping them up, too.
Just look at Amazon right now. It’s flooded with cheap chinese knockoffs, that often even have relatively good reviews. These are “artisanal” fakes, in that there’s actual physical goods involved, which creates overhead and thus limits the amount of fakes that can be introduced.
And now imagine this with autogenerated books from autogenerated authors with autogenerated reviews.
It might be possible to spot fakes. But real authors will drown in the cheap crapcontent flood.
I’m not disagreeing with you. What I’m saying is that the problem is not the existence of AI-generated books, it’s the ability to sort through books for ones you’re likely to enjoy.
The book markets were already flooded with junk long before the latest round of AI came along. If anything the junk was worse before because the “AI” generating it was worse - it was just pasting together Wikipedia articles and whatnot. Or just plain badly written human-generated stuff, there’s no end to that out there either.
