Blog: Books Are Becoming Temu Quality (And AI is Partially to Blame).

I’ve talked a lot about the declining state of literature on this blog since not only is it deeply concerning to me given my love of literature, but there are also a lot of things that contribute to it. A lot of it comes from the overall decline of our society. As people move away from God and towards hedonism, their stories become more banal until ultimately, the moral core is almost entirely gone. The stories no longer have anything to give them meaning; they’re just there for some brief entertainment, if you can even call it that.

However, the decline of our culture isn’t the only thing causing books to feel like the new version of fast fashion. AI has also – predictably – caused books to feel cheaply written and boring.

AI writing books isn’t something new, though the rate at which AI published books are being printed and put on store shelves is unprecedented. The first AI-written book was published in Japan in 2016. A research team at the Sato-Matsuzaki Laboratory developed a program that used automatic text generation based on over a thousand short stories and essays on how to write. They put in the basic outline of the story and allowed the AI to take over from there. It was then entered in a literary contest, where it was accepted and passed the first round.

Later, in 2017, author Ross Goodwin covered his car in surveillance cameras, microphones, and GPS, and connected it all to an AI. The AI then continuously printed the data out on receipt paper rolls as Goodwin went on a road trip. At the end of it, the data was compiled into a book.

Fast forward a few years to 2021, and the Aum Golly series was released, a collection of poems about humanity written entirely by ChatGPT and GPT-3. The first book was written in 24 hours, and the second was written in half the time.

Since then, AI-generated books have blown up, especially as AI has gotten better, with often detrimental results. One author, Mat Auryn, a California-based author who writes books on witchcraft, has been one of the many authors having to battle AI generated books. After writing his book, Psychic Witch, and publishing it, he soon ran into a book on Amazon called Awakening Your Witchy Intuition and Psychic Abilities by Glinda Porter. After buying it on Kindle and reading it, he soon realized that it was an AI-written plagiarization of his book. He quickly found other books plagiarizing his work that were most likely written by AI. Many of them oddly appeared on Amazon, were taken down, and then reappeared later.

Additionally, AI being used by real authors to generate their stories has become a subject of controversy in the reading community. The most infamous and hilarious example was found in Darkhollow Academy: Year 2, a romantasy novel written by Lena McDonald. Not only was the AI prompt to help revise a passage McDonald had written found, but the prompt also included a request to write it in the style of another romance author. It said:

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.

Another embarrassing blunder was found in a romance book called Dark Obsession, which was written by someone called KC Crowne, an author who has over 100 books under his name, all published over seven years. The prompt said:

Certainly! Here’s an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable and injecting additional humor while providing a brief, sexy description of Grigori.

This issue of AI being used to write books has also become such a big deal that over 50 bestselling authors have signed an open letter to publishers demanding that they refuse to publish books that are partially or wholly written by AI. They argue that a robot can’t replace humans since art requires an understanding of the human experience that no robot can really replicate. They also argue that publishing companies need to stand against AI since the language models are trained on pre-existing works, which can almost inevitably lead to plagiarism.

However, while many readers and authors are demanding that AI be kept out of the writing world, the publishing companies sadly have a good incentive not to crackdown on AI-written books. For one thing, AI-written books are cheaper to write, and you can write more of them in a smaller time span than you could with a human author (hence why Amazon is becoming increasingly flooded with AI books).

For another thing, the largest book retailers in the market – such as Barnes & Noble – don’t particularly care if a book is AI or not. Recently, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, James Durant, came out and said that he is in support of selling AI-generated books as long as they’re clearly marked as such. He’s also said that there may already by AI-generated books being sold in Barnes & Noble stores that they’re not currently aware of.

To make things worse, not only has AI ended up discouraging authors and publishers from writing and publishing books made with actual human creativity for the sake of making a profit, but there’s also a problem with the readers. Thanks to social media and shrinking attention spans, readers don’t read as thoroughly as they used to. Thus, even if the AI-influence is obvious, readers may not notice it due to skimming over it. Or, worse, they simply don’t care. As long as the story is steamy and follows the same addictive plot beats, who cares if it’s written by AI? They get the same high either way.

While not the full reason why writing feels cheap and boring nowadays, AI has certainly contributed to the problem. To be clear, I have nothing against using AI as an editing tool, but if large swaths of your story are generated by AI, then it should have no place in a bookstore. Though I wish that AI would be rejected from the publishing industry entirely, due to how easy it is to use and the efficiency with which it gets stories out there, it likely won’t stop being used to write books.

Until next time,

M.J.