If you're generating AI content that's better than any book you've ever read, in the _current_ state of what's available, I'd suggest reading some different books.
I believe we'll find a balance, as with anything. There will always be people publishing junk, including AI-generated junk. But many authors will learn to use AI to supplement their work and produce a high-quality product.
With all due respect, you're probably kidding yourself about the quality of your AI generated book.
4 is somewhat more interesting, and I've seen worse from actual humans, but… roll a d6, and on a 1-5 it's terrible, roll a 6 and you get something that's 90% fantastic and 10% just a bit off. For example, this story: https://github.com/BenWheatley/Fiction/blob/main/The%20Silen...
I like it, but if I really examine the thing, the details don't quite line up right. The humans were supposedly primitive, yet "[t]heir cruisers absorbed salvos that would've shattered lesser vessels"?
And sure, there are a million oddities like this in "proper" fiction[0]; but this… still feels like Stable Diffusion in text form. It's cool, it's a technological marvel, it's still, ineffably, not quite right.
[0] Even ignoring that the top speed in the pilot episode should've gotten them home in 7 years rather than 70, Voyager had a bajillion ways to get home sooner — for example, putting the crew in stasis so they didn't age, going at a normal speed, and then using any of the time machines Starfleet keeps tripping over.
To me, it's fine that it has no named characters, no dialog. One of the most grating things in plots with aliens is the names, no matter if they're American names like the spiders in A Deepness in the Sky, or the Star Trek pattern giving us random apostrophes and internal capitalisation, where "Q'ting'pAh" could easily be either Klingon or Vulcan.
[1] Not all of the output of 4, like I said it's mostly bad, but that I like this particular result.
This is a bit of a tangent, but: you missed an important point in that book with some broad implications. Those weren't the spiders' names, those were the translators' deliberately humanized names for the spiders.
(And, to bring the discussion back home: no language model would have ever come up with a clever narrative trick like this.)
Just because it had a good in-universe reason didn't stop it being grating.
How much editing are you adding/subtracting to the content?
How granular are your prompts (e.g., prompting for roughly each new paragraph, ~page, chapter, or larger)?
How much are you finding you need to repeat/retry to get good output for your project?
I can't share my exact prompt style since I believe I've found a reliable way to generate these books en masse with minimal factual errors.
If there are factually incorrect things to the books hallucinated by LLMs, they're not non-fiction.
>...minimal factual errors
This is still really bad when pretending to be a book portraying historical events...
Are there any AI generated books out there that have found an audience and built a fan base?
I don't doubt that it's going to happen but I'm skeptical if we are all that close.
There are some very successful authors out there that many would say are awful, so that's why I asked for books with a fan base rather than good books.
I'd be surprised if the book can follow a consistent plot rather than hallucinating characters halfway through.