Ever since its creation, AI has been a hot-button topic. There are multiple ways that AI has been used for good, and to improve life; its creation in general is a marvel of just how far technology has come. That being said, as humans tend to do, we have taken AI too far, using it in our everyday lives in place of creativity and critical thinking. This is far more apparent in the rise of AI usage in the book industry.
AI usage
When ChatGPT launched in early 2023, it changed the way people live their lives. Making it easier to create ideas, gather information and, in the case of students, complete assignments. Society began to use AI for every aspect of their lives, slowly becoming devoid of creativity and critical thinking skills in the process.
The book industry and other aspects of writing were substantially hit with AI slop – referring to the content made with generative artificial intelligence that is perceived as lacking in effort, quality or meaning. Hundreds of AI-written books appeared on Amazon, causing them to create a new rule that limited people to publishing up to three books a day.
To this day, Amazon is rife with all kinds of AI slop books, ranging from romance novels to cookbooks to children’s books. An article from The Guardian reports that 82% of herbal remedy books on Amazon are likely written by AI, which is incredibly dangerous and could lead to harmful and even fatal consequences for readers.
Recently, AI use has gotten even more out of hand, with the Department of Justice reporting that AI is being used to generate police reports. This could lead to reports including false information, as AI tends to hallucinate and fill in blanks with random and untrue information.
Additionally, an article from 2025 talks about how AI is inventing academic papers that don’t exist and that are being cited in real journals. These examples show that AI has more real and harmful implications than authors using AI to write books, but that AI usage is hurtful to those who use and consume it all the same.
ai in the book world
The New York Times published an article about a romance author who goes by the pen name Coral Hart, who used generative AI to create more than 200 novels that she self-published on Amazon last year. Allegedly, she sold around 50,000 copies and earned six figures from these AI-generated books. Now she’s teaching other authors how to use AI to generate novels and is rolling out an AI writing program that will construct a novel in just 45 minutes.
This is the most extreme use of AI in the book industry, but sadly, it’s not uncommon. Two romantasy authors issued public apologies last year after ChatGPT prompts were left in the final drafts of their novels, but many authors who use AI to write their books never get caught.
The use of AI in the writing process is hotly debated among the book community. How much use of AI is acceptable? Is it okay to use AI to generate ideas, to help with research, to edit drafts, to write passages?
A site called BookBub surveyed over 1,200 authors to see how authors were currently thinking about AI in relation to their work, and as expected, the authors surveyed were split nearly evenly on AI use. About 45% are currently using generative AI to assist with their work, while 48% are not and do not plan to in the future, and another 7% of respondents are not currently using AI but might use it in the future.
Another interesting result from this survey is that of the authors who had used AI, 72% said that they did not disclose that they had used it. They commented that readers don’t need to know “how the sausage gets made” and that delivering a satisfying story is what really matters most.
However, if authors don’t disclose this information, readers have no means of knowing which portion of these authors are actually using AI to write some or all of their book. This can lead to some readers feeling blindsided. It also raises questions about how the use of AI should be disclosed to readers and how to regulate it going forward.
implications
It should go without saying that the implications of using AI, whether just for research or for writing entire books, are harmful to the book community, as well as society and the environment as a whole. At its core, generative AI imitates the data it’s been given, scrapes from other books and works without the author or owner’s consent.
All AI content is a direct copy of work someone else has made themselves. It’s incapable of creating any new ideas of its own and generating something 100% original. The words and images that come as a result of AI usage would not be possible without the work of humans to learn from.
Since AI scrapes from the rest of the internet, it can only generate generic prompts, which leads to very generic books with no depth or nuance to them. AI writing lacks the heart and soul that humans have. It lacks passion, creativity and personal experience. A novel has a voice. It has something a human was trying to communicate about love, about fear, about what it means to be alive.
It is the author’s time, energy and heart poured into a written form. What AI produces when given a prompt or outline is an arrangement of words that are trying to resemble a novel, but it does not have the human touch and/or emotion that makes man-made novels so special. It’s not doing something new. It’s not trying to grow as a person or grow as a writer.
AI usage in books is messy and maddening, but it’s not going to go away, so we need to have open conversations about it. It is so important that we continue to write books, create art and share stories, lest we allow the industry to get overrun by unregulated slop that throws substance and meaning out the window. Art is important to our histories, our cultures, to human beings as a whole and if we continue to use AI to create art for us, we lose a vital aspect of humanity and being a human.