News JVTech AI publishes so many books that Amazon has made a decision: limit self-publishing
Published on March 1, 2024 at 12:40 p.m
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The proliferation of AI-written books has led Amazon to limit self-publishing. The very generous limit gives an idea of the extent of the problem: three books per day per “author”. This phenomenon makes it difficult to find high-quality and original works on sales platforms.
Self-publishing on Amazon: an El Dorado since the arrival of AI?
The proliferation of books written with artificial intelligence is slowly getting out of control. Since ChatGPT exploded in early 2023, almost any artist can play and try to monetize the bots' work. In just a few steps, you'll have a short novel ready for self-publishing.
Little reminder. Self-publishing is a growing sector in the book industry and Amazonoffers aspiring authors a comprehensive and accessible solution for publishing and distributing their works in digital and paper formats through its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform. This platform allows authors to retain full control of their copyrights and benefit from global distribution, while being compensated under an attractive licensing model. If the author in question is an AI and copyright falls into the pockets of humans, understand that some are interested in writing dozens or even hundreds of extremely lame books aimed only at generating money.
We have received the official response from Amazon!
Amazon is aware that its platform can enable fraudsters to produce mass-produced low-cost content and has therefore taken the lead. A new regulation was recently introduced: An author can only self-publish three books per day on KDP. Yes yes, three per DAY. There was a limit in the past, but despite our research we couldn't find it. Amazon doesn't seem to have revealed this anywhere.
Our teams at Webedia contacted Amazon to get the company's opinion on the topic we are interested in today. Here is that statement, translated by us:
Amazon continually evaluates the various new technologies available and strives to provide authors and customers with the best buying, reading and editing experience.
Although we have not seen a significant increase in the number of articles published on KDP (Amazon's self-publishing tool) due to the increasing availability of generative artificial intelligence tools, we have updated our policies that now require authors and publishers to specifically inform us to inform you whether your content is generated by artificial intelligence.
We also recently reduced the number of new messages allowed for KDP publishers to protect customers from potential abuse. Although we allow AI-generated content, we do not allow AI-generated content that violates our policies, including content that provides a poor customer experience.
The market leader in online sales affirms: their new measure would be more preventative than anything else. In her opinion, there is no explosion of mediocre e-books on the Internet. The challenge for the company, which still accepts AI-generated texts, seems to be how to make it happen Protect the image of self-published books. In fact, it's quite difficult for consumers to trust independent authors when good works are buried among texts copied and pasted from ChatGPT.
Other trends in AI-generated books: Very fraudulent methods are emerging
Our colleagues at The Washington Post recently mentioned a case that is related to the case we are interested in. In an essay they tell us that this is happening AI copies and paraphrases works of human authors. They mention the specific example of a particularly technical book that required more than a year of hard work and was published by an AI just three weeks after its original publication.
Another (certainly) similar trend is starting to pose a problem: this Summaries of popular books written by an AI. There are many. The strategy of cheater ? Make it seem like these summaries are cheap copies of the original work. Imagine you see a beautiful cover that MidJourney created for a famous book, say for example from 1984, you don't take into account the small discreet mention of “book summary” and you spend 5 euros to get the answer from ChatGPT to the prompt “ Summarize for me, chapter by chapter, the entire year of 1984 by George Orwell.
Caitlyn Lynch, a freelance writer, reported that only 19 of the 100 best-selling contemporary romance novels on Amazon were written by people. The other 81 are the work of robots, again the result of the work of poorly qualified pseudo-authors.
ChatGPT is a brilliant invention and the authors are very good at it Use it as a tool, occasional help. Right now, no one wants to read a book created entirely by an insensitive robot. At most, we will only agree to open a book written by an AI if the “author” was honest and admitted it. There are already stores dedicated exclusively to these types of titles, such as BookBud.ai. To each his job.