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

So, he used ChatGPT to create a children's book in _4 hours_ and he is now a published author, the very thing he dreamed to become? Please...

"The idea of writing a book finally seemed possible"

There is no mention of the guy being disabled or unable to write himself. It's a complete fluff piece that Reuters failed to properly articulate. They should've started with the Amazon part and then used this guy as an example rather use a pretentious introduction that deserves no praise nor any respect.

Looks like click farms have expanded into book publishing. The tech revolution of diminishing standards seems to be progressing steadily. You can now ride in your Cruise self-driving car that drives slow and stops in awkward places, while reading a soulless, irrelevant book and look up inaccurate info in Bing. The future really is never as you picture it.

>Ghostwriting - by humans - has a long tradition, she said, but the ability to automate through AI could turn book writing from a craft into a commodity.

I think writing has already become a commodity. Go on Fiverr and you'll find people offering to write on any topic, fiction and non, for fractions of a cent/word.

The biggest reason I can see someone using ChatGPT to generate a children's book vs paying someone overseas to do it is about $10. Words are cheap, astonishingly cheap, what's not cheap is reputation and credibility. I don't see a big reason for authors to worry, yet.

Somewhat related, and might give insight. This seems like the next step of the "hustle culture" this video explores, definetly worth a watch:

https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw

People looking to get rich quick write (or pay sweatshops to write) very low effort, poorly researched books about obscure topics. They put them on amazon, maybe make some money, then repeat. The video explores one of those buyable programs to get you involved in all of that.

Seems like chatGPT is being used as the next tool in this process

This is really just the latest is a list of reasons why I no longer consider reading by itself to be an intellectual past-time. The line between books and content is "blurring", and has been well-before ChatGPT. You could "write a book" with a modest budget using a team of ghostwriters on Fiverr. Splurge a bit more and you could commission some illustrations from a desperate artist in a country with significantly less purchasing power than the US. Instructional ebooks are little more than blog posts.

I mean, obviously, reading isn't bad, it's just that I have suspicions about anyone who prides themselves of being an avid reader.

That all being said, you'd be surprised by the money that exists out there. Coworker of mine had a wife who wrote erotic fiction in ebook formats. She made about $80,000 a month doing that, though about half of that went to advertising, and another chunk of money went to employing a bunch of ghostwriters, not to mention hiring models to do photoshoots for book covers. Still, that's nearly $1 million every year before taxes and expenses. Can you truly say your startup is doing better?

The killer feature the publishing industry and writers bring to the market is curation. That is curation of the facts, story line for brevity, etc. all things ChatGPT cannot do.

I want to hate on ChatGPT-written books... But then there's this.

My Prompt (I have endless random ideas like this as I walk the dogs and listen to audio books):

Suggest the plot for a military science fiction book. The galaxy is divided into factions based on their fundamental properties: organic vs. artificial, living vs. dead, good vs. evil, plant vs. animal vs. mineral.

ChatGPT:

Title: "Galactic Rift: The War Between Factions"

In a faraway galaxy, a vast and complex network of planets is divided into factions based on their fundamental properties. The organic and living species have formed an alliance, while the artificial and dead ones have joined forces to control the galaxy. The plant, animal, and mineral factions are split amongst the two alliances, leading to a tense political climate.

Amidst this divide, a brilliant military strategist, General Alara, commands a flagship of the organic alliance, the Stellar Phoenix. She is tasked with leading her crew through dangerous space battles against the ruthless and technologically advanced artificial faction. The stakes are high, as the victor will control the galaxy and its resources.

As General Alara and her team engage in war, they encounter unexpected allies and enemies. They discover that not everything is as it seems, and that the factions are more complex than their fundamental properties suggest. The lines between good and evil are blurred, and each side is driven by their own motivations.

As the war intensifies, General Alara must make difficult decisions that challenge her beliefs and loyalties. She is forced to confront the dark side of her alliance and question whether the organic faction truly represents the good side of the war. Her personal journey is intertwined with the fate of the galaxy, as the war reaches its climactic conclusion.

In "Galactic Rift: The War Between Factions," the reader is taken on a journey through a galaxy filled with political intrigue, space battles, and philosophical questions. The plot explores themes of identity, morality, and the consequences of war. The novel offers a unique take on military science fiction, breaking free from the traditional tropes and challenging the reader's assumptions about good and evil.

Not bad. I'd read that book.

As great as ChatGPT is, the content it generates tends to follow some fairly repetitive patterns & styles, and it's going to be pretty easy to identify unless heavily edited.

However, I also suspect this technology will develop very rapidly: just look at how quickly the AI art scene has evolved since Stable Diffusion came along. Pretty crude at first, but the quality of stuff coming out of it is amazing now.

I've tried a couple of apps that promise to create children stories based on ChatGPT and while it works (-ish) for short stories I think the only way to get a better and longer output that is decent enough to warrant publishing is to be very hands on with the prompts, at which point I'd argue it's possibly considered real creative work and ChatGPT is just a (very powerful) tool, not a full-blown substitute for a writer/author.

> There were over 200 e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store as of mid-February listing ChatGPT as an author or co-author, including "How to Write and Create Content Using ChatGPT," "The Power of Homework" and poetry collection "Echoes of the Universe." And the number is rising daily. There is even a new sub-genre on Amazon: Books about using ChatGPT, written entirely by ChatGPT.

Given that these books are published in the US, good luck attempting to copyright something that has been majority outputted or entirely created from an AI like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion since that is completely un-copyrightable and is instead public domain. [0]

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...

And this is just why people say you should not read anything written in the past century, taken to the 11th degree.

What’s more, he can also write hundreds of fake reviews on Amazon. Nobody can tell the difference!

It was already the case that "90% of everything is garbage".

Now with AI humanity can achieve 99.999%.

Eternal September part 2. Or maybe we'll call the rest of time the Eternal February.

I’m not so worried about books, because there’s generally a human in the loop between writing a book and publishing it, but how long do we expect search engines to remain useable? Blogspam is already a real issue when it comes to finding stuff via search, I have a bad feeling it’s going to get much harder to find what you need to find as machine learning tools out-SEO humans.

Whatever it is, I will suggest to stay away from this kind of contents created by AI. Human creativity replacement should not be sought

I've asked ChatGPT to write some stories, and I have found the output amusing. I could see reading some of them to children. Maybe they don't make a great deal of sense, but they're still fun. Or perhaps, because they don't make a great deal of sense, that's what makes them fun?

The second iteration will be interactive books - like that forsaken episode of Black Mirror was exploring. Taking us one step closer to "Diamond Age". Human connection doesn't necessarily has to be in the plot - the human behind can be at any extra layer.

To be honest, I see a continuum between using spellchecker, grammarly, or anything that comes above. You seed the intention, and you get an improved result - by means of huge datasets.

In a way, the hollywood machinery has been doing A/B testing on the likelihood to get a human brain hooked on the way to tell a story - structurally, there are not so many different stories. This only removes the need to have monkeys at the typing machine.

And yes, I'm being slightly sarcastic. But only a tiny bit. That way you can be sure it's a human writing this.

ED Hirsch is looking more and more prescient every day.

I mean, really, sure: there are a few dozen really clever children's books that come out every year that deserve to be added to the "pantheon" but isn't this area basically saturated?

Imagine you read your child one book a day for their first 5 years, you and they co-read two books a day from age 5 to age 10 and then they move on forever to whatever arbitrary boundary we set for "children's books" versus the rest of literature.

Assuming a modest amount of re-reading your favorites, that's an ambitious local maximum of about 5,000 books.

Realistically, this number is more like 1,000 to 1,500 books. This space is already well curated - Scheherazade has you covered in a single compendium!

There's no way any random ChatGPT production is going to cut into the space.

Search for any popular title on Amazon and down the list you will always find "imposter books", with similar titles, author names and cover designs. Sometimes they blatantly use the authors copyrights, but usually they are just different enough to avoid being taken down. With Amazon not publishing the book until a copy is ordered, there is really no cost of the sellers part ... and if you can get 100 customers to buy the wrong book by mistake ...

My point is that is kind of work is already all over Amazon. The only thing that is changing is there is new production method. But when you can pay someone is a low cost county $10 to make the work, the cost is negligible.

I don't think authors have anything to worry about yet.

I tried using ChatGPT to write theoretical future episodes of the show 24. The output was extremely drab and focused on re-used concepts. I tried to aid it with specifics like Jack is the president and his first lady is actually the infiltrator. It used that, but it didn't come up with the compelling stuff. So I guess if you want drab content, buy one of these books. If the author on the other hand uses it to take a compelling story line into the paragraphs... maybe.

Amazon Kindle Unlimited was already full of crappy books. Especially children's book. Hundreds of books with just images taken from google and nonsense wording.

The next wave of print journalism is upon us. Soon we will gladly companies to get access to their organically created and edited content slathered in Ads and DRM.

This will make a great money laundering pipeline for criminals. Orange jumpsuit man might just turn a new leaf and become a bookworm.

26 years ago I wrote this short story for publication in some random SF zine that later got published elsewhere.

https://justinlloyd.li/blog/the-greatest-story-never-sold/

Doesn't the majority of the market already buy based on trusted reviews or familiarity with the author?

Until the quality of the books improves, nobody is buying these except for novelty.

As for stopping the influx of junk, wouldn't it eventually settle down after all but a few names fail to cash in on this?

Some people want to be authors and some people want to have been an author.

The person who wants to be an author, writes, writes and writes some more.

The person who wants to have been an author takes short cuts. All they're interested in is being able to say, "look what I did".

With a little prodding it seems you can generate a wide variety of content from ChatGPT. Although its default mode does seem to have some political-ideological biases, after having a discussion with it about Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" I got it to write a positive story about a communist revolution in the United States, which overthrows a corporate-backed fascist dictatorship:

> "...the real power lay with a small group of corporate interests that had eagerly collaborated with the fascist regimes. These corporate interests, which had significant holdings in the pharmaceutical, fossil fuel, armaments, and banking sectors, saw the rise of the fascist leaders as an opportunity to consolidate their monopoly power and increase their profits. They willingly supported the regimes, providing financial backing, technology, and expertise, in exchange for exclusive contracts and favorable treatment."

> "However, not everyone was content with the status quo. A heroic communist leader, recognizing the grave threat to democracy and social justice posed by the corporate-backed fascist regimes, began to organize a resistance movement. She saw that the only way to defeat the fascists and corporate interests was to implement socialism and build a society that valued human dignity and the common good."

I have little doubt that if one first held a discussion with ChatGPT regarding Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" and the works of Milton Friedman one could get it to generate content of a quite different flavor. In other words, there's no need for political ideologues to starting having apoplepctic fits over this. Although now that I think of it, perhaps referring to apoplexy in this derogatory manner is ableist, hence this post must be censored...?

Just did a quick search on Amazon.

"Written by Artificial Intelligence" 2,000 results.

You could use Bing Chat to write periodic children’s books on current events.

Movies are next. Soon you will be able to generate a whole movie in a fraction of a second with a single prompt. And it will be more novel and creative than garbage coming out of Hollywood.

Future historians poking their fire with post-historic twigs in a post-nuclear apocalypse: “what were they thinking?”

Extra reason to avoid amazon.

Head First Novel Writing with ChatGPT.