Generative AI is Turning Publishing Into a Swamp of Slop
(Photo: Horacio Villalobos - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
Here’s a test for you: Visit Amazon or any other site selling books, search for a random title, and see how long it takes for an obviously AI-generated entry to appear. Browse the recommended titles under a real book, and the chances are you’ll still be barraged by ones with Midjourney covers that all bear the same uncanny sheen of AI artwork. As readers and writers the world over contend with the increasing stranglehold that AI in all its forms has over our entertainment, it’s become impossible to ignore how much this slop has come to dominate cultural spaces.
Over the past couple of years, as tools like ChatGPT have become more accessible, there have been a number of scandals involving so-called authors being caught using them to churn out title after title for a quick buck. Last month, readers caught out authors K.C. Crowne and Lena McDonald for leaving ChatGPT prompts in their unedited books. “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements,” reads a note in chapter three of McDonald’s Darkhollow Academy: Year 2. (J Bree is also an author of romance and fantasy novels.) McDonald explained her mess on her Amazon book page, claiming that she used AI “to help edit and shape parts of the book” because she couldn’t afford a professional editor. This doesn’t explain the prompt asking ChatGPT to copy another writer’s style.
More and more authors are finding their work being pilfered or weirdly duplicated by AI on platforms like Amazon. Writer Marie Arana told NPR that, after she published her book Latinoland, a 500+ page nonfiction piece she spent many years researching, a ton of titles popped up the very next day that were clearly related to her work. “Right below the cover of my book was another cover, and the cover said ‘America’s Largest And Least Understood Minority.’ And then it said ‘A Summary Of Latinoland’.” Joseph Cox had a similar experience, writing for 404 Media about an AI slop summary of his own book, sold on Amazon for $4.99, which “condensed each of my chapters into a few-page overview.” How could someone offer summaries and copycat titles of a book within 24 hours of it hitting the market? There’s only one answer to that.
Creative professionals have long found themselves amid an existential crisis in a market where profits are slim and the vast majority of them will not make a living wage solely from their art. Those matters have become exacerbated tenfold by the speedy implementation of generative-AI technology within their spaces. Traditional publishers, for instance, have invested heavily in AI in ways that authors and editors have rebelled against. HarperCollins revealed that it had “reached an agreement with an artificial intelligence company to allow limited use of select nonfiction backlist titles for training AI models to improve model quality and performance” last year. This came after children’s author Daniel Kibblesmith revealed that he’d been offered money for permission to use one of his books published by HarperCollins for AI model training.
Last year, a startup named Spines announced plans to publish up to 8,000 books by offering writers the chance to have their books edited, formatted, designed, and distributed with AI (all for a fee of somewhere between $1,200 and $5,000.) They claim that this is not vanity publishing but it’s no different from the olden days where you paid some guy in his basement to make an MS Paint cover to your book and print copies by hand. AI claims it’s disrupting the norm, but it’s merely reheating the nachos of the past with more scammy elements.
With this influx has come, inevitably, job losses. Last April, the Society of Authors published a survey that showed 26% of authors and 36% of translators polled have already lost work and income due to generative AI. Eighty-six percent said they were “concerned about their style, voice, and likeness being mimicked or reproduced in generative AI output.”