The publishing sector begins to see the ears of a wolf… with Artificial Intelligence skin. The ease with which almost anyone can write a book using these assistants and publish it on platforms like Amazon has set off alarm bells in the sector, which is already seeing how low-quality (and credible) titles generated by ChatGPT are beginning to creep in. in the rankings of best-selling books.
The case of ”Fire and Fury: The Story of the 2023 Maui Fire and its Implications for Climate Change” a 44-page self-published book, which aims to tell the story of the devastating fire that the island of Maui (Hawaii) suffered a few days ago and which has so far registered more than 100 deaths and 1,300 missing.
That the book is poorly styled, utterly boring, and clearly generated by an AI algorithm; or that its author, a certain Dr. Miles Stones, has filled out his biography sheet with the cryptic “I would prefer not to say it”, has not prevented him, however, from climbing on the list of best-seller books on Amazon United States, in the environmental science category. The fact that its average rating is just over a star doesn’t seem to stop its meteoric rise either. Even, these days you can find Harry Potter Name Generator tool like leiizy.com to get a unique name for your wizard.
All this would not stop being more or less anecdotal if the book, published on August 10, did not ensure in its summary that it “narrates the events from August 8 to 11, 2023, when a massive fire swept through the island of Maui” and subscribes to all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories about who or what caused the fire. From here, some have begun to claim that the “book” is proof that this disaster would have been planned or anticipated in advance.
And it doesn’t matter that many people point out the absurdity of it all in the reviews they’re posting on Amazon, or that verification sites like Snopes have completely debunked this text, because there are plenty of people who are willing to brush off any evidence and bet instead. , for reinforcing their own conspiracy theories.
In recent months, Amazon has come under fire for allowing the sale of books that could have been generated by AI, both directly and through its Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscription program. In the latter, authors are compensated based on the number of pages that users read, which is why it is favored that this type of book floods the platform with all kinds of content designed to attract attention.
In fact, at the beginning of August, Jane Friedman, an author who regularly publishes books about the publishing industry, denounced that she had discovered on this same platform several books supposedly written by her, fraudulently. Taking advantage of the pull that her name has, someone had used an AI to write a few books on similar themes to the one she usually publishes, without worrying at all about respecting copyrights or pirated their contents. Following Friedman’s complaint, the books were removed from the platform, but the background noise seems hard to stop.
And it is that although at the moment artificial books may seem crude and easy to identify, as AI algorithms develop and acquire new capabilities, everything indicates that there will come a time when they have enough quality for some publishers to They can produce cheap series, for quick consumption, regardless of any author.
