AI Authors Are ‘Choking’ Human Authors On E-Bookstores

Online Bookstores And Websites Are Getting Flooded With AI-Generated Material 

 In the past few months, we’ve been witness to the rapid and majestic growth of AI. The technology has spread into various fields improving output in most cases but without doubt spelling danger for humans in said fields.

As per recent claims, it seems that writers are no different. This is clear as most e-bookstores are ‘choked’ with AI-written literature and material. As reported by The Washington Post, Books almost and even entirely generated by AI are flooding Amazon’s marketplace.

However, books and authors are not the only victims of this situation. Other forms of written content are getting churned out into the internet by AI or using AI.

A staggering 49 websites were found to be creating content that appeared to be either primarily or fully AI-generated in April alone. This is according to NewsGuard, a company that evaluates the reliability of online news sources.

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One of the many victims of AI in this manner is Chris Cowell, a Portland-based software developer. According to the Washington Post, Chris spent over a year writing a technical how-to book only for another book on the same topic to be released three weeks before he was due to release his book.

The released version was titled “Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines,” and the credited author was Marie Karpos. After not finding any other work under Marie’s name, Chriss also learned that the book bore signs that it was written largely or entirely by an AI language model.

As the Washington Post identifies, most of the AI-generated content is on niche topics and while most of the content might be from the same publishers, the authors are rarely the same. Another common occurrence is the flurry of five-star reviews under these books.

These AI-generated books are ‘a sobering new reality’ for authors. As Chris Powell puts it, “It doesn’t help to know that any text I write will inevitably be fed into an AI system that will generate even more competition.”

Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at the AI start-up Hugging Face posits that AI being allowed to generate content in the same field as humans would lead to losing track of what the truth is.

“Without grounding, the system can make stuff up. And if it’s that same made-up thing all over the world, how do you trace it back to what reality is?” She spoke.

Also, considering how fast AI-generated content is growing, a digital misinformation crisis is on the horizon. As Wealth Of Geeks reports, “We could see AI-driven web traffic getting into a spiral of copied-then-recopied information, sparking a research and verification black hole.”