hate at first read: book spam by chat bots is smothering the web

Readers feel scammed. Authors are furious. But AI book slop continues to proliferate like a plague.

I will be the first one to admit not to reading as many books as I’d like to be reading, which is a painful confession because since I was a little kid, you’d need a crowbar to pry me away from a mystery novel, or a sci-fi epic, or a fantasy series, or a historical tome, or practical non-fiction. You know those kids whose parents pretend they have no idea their child is hiding under the covers with a flashlight and a book at bedtime, and yet that flashlight somehow never runs out of batteries? Yeah, that was me.

Fast forward to today, when the average person reads about a dozen books a year, a lot of kids are hiding under the covers with their phones to watch TikTok videos, and writing and publishing itself is in crisis, both traditional and digital. And yes, AI slop is playing an outsized part in all of this.

First and foremost, while great books are still being written and read, almost none of them are making money. Not enough people buy anything but celebrity-ghostwritten autobiographies or vanity projects, and authors who aren’t already household names are biting their elbows as all the hard work of promotion and PR fell to them while the publishers take massive cuts to recoup small advances. People seldom hear about all these great books and why they should read them, adding to the conundrum.

Given the choice of having to do all the work and keep maybe 15% after paying their agents and managers from an already very small pot of money, if any, and also do all the work while keeping 75% of also not a lot, but still something, many authors have gone digital and eschewed publishers altogether. Which makes sense. Why spend a year or ten knocking on doors just to be rejected until you’re offered a lose-lose deal from which you’ll maybe see $10,000 once, then languish in obscurity?

it was a dark, chat bot generated night…

Except there’s a new problem. Your book is but one standard entry among the tens of millions in the giant content machine that is the internet while the public is constantly looking for more. Forget the cozy PR tours and being promoted by reviewers or book clubs. Those are for celebrities, which you are not. You are a content creator and your job is to create some goddamn content. A lot of it. And quickly, so you will have better odds of being noticed by the algorithm.

But writing a book is hard. It can take years and you need money now. Hell, everyone does given inflation and the costs of living trying to achieve escape velocity back into feudal peonage. Now there’s a tool that will help you do the hard work of turning all of your ideas for books into actual books. Or at least help you if you get stuck. It doesn’t need to be a great book. Just something people will buy, even if it’s on accident. One grand here, two grand there, and suddenly, you’re getting caught up on bills.

Until your fellow authors catch you doing it. And they’re absolutely livid, especially as they notice that you used their work to create shoddy, error-filled summaries to pass off as yours, of lifted their style, characters, or entire reworked chapters of theirs with specific prompt instructions to do so, instructions you were too sloppy to edit out. In their eyes, you’re not a writer, you’re a book drop-shipper and a thief. What you do is making their jobs much harder and the web nearly unusable to humans.

a screaming comes across the kindles

Amazon is now drowning under a torrent of AI slop marketed in scammy ways as both authors and readers are complaining about the sheer pervasiveness of this mindless, soulless pulp. To combat this trend, they lowered daily posting limits but that didn’t so much as make a dent in the problem, and neither did their request that authors label a book as either AI-generated or AI-assisted. In fact, some purveyors of said slop foam at the mouth with rage when asked to disclose this fact.

You see, they’re authors and creatives. The only thing that’s been stopping them from writing before was the whole, you know, actually having to write stuff down then edit it part. Now that a server somewhere can do it for them in a matter of minutes with idea prompts, they’re finally able to write their great novel, which will surely one day win a Nobel Prize in literature. It’s actually super rude and abelist of you to imply they’re not authors just because they didn’t do 99% of the work a writer does.

But the fact of the matter is that they pose a major risk to any publisher and platform since the tsunami of their garbage overtakes actual books people want to read. There will be a critical point where millions will simply start giving up on KDP and flocking to bookstores or platforms that ruthlessly delete AI slop and ban their submitters, much like so many people simply stopped checking their e-mails or picking up their phones unless it’s absolutely critical, too overwhelmed by scams, spam, and ads to view them as viable forms of communication.

Ultimately, it’s up to Amazon and other platforms for creative works how they want to regulate the content off which they’re trying to profit. They can continue to turn blind eyes to this until there’s a user revolt, but given the short tempers of both writers and readers, they need to figure out what to do sooner rather than later.