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.”
We’re seeing this in practice in various ways. A 2025 report from Bloomberg delved into the case of Inkitt, an online publishing platform with a subscription-based site called Galatea. Writers are snapped up from sites like Wattpad and offered contracts wherein they can keep royalties even if they hand over duties to AI ghostwriters. But this model, which produces far lower quality works than humans create, also screws over those whose work is being plundered. Bloomberg writer Vauhini Vara noted, “As Inkitt’s standard contract for Galatea writers—which I reviewed myself and discussed with multiple people who’ve seen it—offers them less compensation than is typical of publishing contracts, while giving Inkitt far more control over the stories it acquires.” It’s never been about giving writers a “tool” to help them. It’s always been about entirely eliminating them from the process.
And then, of course, there’s the more intellectual threat posed by AI. Various apps and AI platforms are now pushing summary options. Why bother reading that pesky book when a computer can give you the bullet point version instead? Magibook prides itself on being a way to make books easier to read by dumbing down prose and ideas, and occasionally whitewashing historical content. Did you think that Charles Dickens’ famous quote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” was too wordy and old-fashioned? Now it can be, “It was a time when things were very good and very bad.” Such apps sell themselves as a way to be more efficient, to always be optimizing. Art is nothing but content to be churned out for money in this world, and it’s a philosophy that’s taking over. Hollywood had to go on strike to stop it and studios are still investing in AI over humans.
The issue seems likely to get worse before it gets better. In the UK, artists across varying mediums, including literature, have decried the government’s proposals to let artificial intelligence companies use copyright-protected work without permission. Publishers have openly embraced the technology in spite of outcry from authors and editors alike. An investigation by The Atlantic revealed that Meta may have accessed millions of pirated books and research papers through various platforms to train its AI system. A class action lawsuit is currently in place against Meta for this.
The craven nature of AI in its current form is evident, but perhaps it’s its biggest advocates whose pleas reveal the truth of the matter. Meta’s former head of global affairs Nick Clegg said asking for permission from rights owners to train models is “implausible” and that it would “basically kill the AI industry in this country [the U.K.] overnight.” That’s the gross reality of this Faustian bargain none of us signed up for: this system cannot work without theft, so we are expected to roll over and let it happen so that we can live in a world where art is meaningless beyond its immediate monetary value. If it can’t be churned out at record speed then it’s not worth doing. This is, as Cory Doctorow called it, the enshittification of everything, a corporate mandate to make everything worse in the name of profit. AI books aren’t stuffed into the world because of audience demand or artistic need: they’re a way to overrun the market to the point where readers and writers alike have no choice but to accept it as part of the status quo.
That Bloomberg report also revealed an unspoken truth about the AI glut that is swallowing publishing’s hopes and dreams. Inkitt CEO Ali Albazaz said, “You need to have a brand, you need to have a persona behind the book. However, that can be generated by AI. If you tell customers, ‘Hey, this is AI-generated,’ nobody’s going to read it…You need to make it plausible that this is a human.” Right now, the vast majority of people don’t want soulless slop churned out by the plagiarism machine. They want stories by people with visions, enthusiasm, and emotions. They don’t buy books with no listed author. Even ones with Midjourney-made covers are at least assumed to have a human’s original ideas behind them. Where is the market for books that exist solely as the quickly produced end result of copying other works with no thought or passion? Your aunt sharing weirdly clammy AI art of shrimp shaped like Jesus on Facebook probably isn’t even that desperate.
It’s easy to fall into the doom spiral that seems to define this current era regarding the proliferation of generative AI. Certainly, as a writer who has myself survived the “pivot to video” scam, I’m keenly aware of how much my own livelihood is at stake in this market. But art endures. We have thousands of years of it in our corner and billions of minds who are always inspired. This bubble will burst eventually, just like NFTs and the crypto boom before it. The damage it will do in the meantime is the real concern, so vigilance and renewed media literacy are crucial. It’s always worth investing in humans, so check where your book-buying dollars are going. Those with the voices worth listening to will always shout the loudest.
Kayleigh Donaldson is a critic and pop culture writer for Pajiba.com. Her work can also be found on IGN, Slashfilm, Uproxx, Little White Lies, Vulture, Roger Ebert, and other publications. She lives in Dundee.
