I think for me I’m just going to accept that I won’t be reading any modern fiction, likely ever. It isn’t like there isn’t more than I could read in multiple lifetimes already out there that is pre, say, 2010. But the other side is that fiction has never been worse, because the commercial impetus to become a published fiction writer has never been lower (literally since before the 1600s, given functional literacy levels and the amount of fiction reading the average person does). The Steinbecks of the world aren’t writing novels in 2025.
Sad but true, and I'm in the same boat. I'm sure you and I will miss a few gems of contemporary fiction, but wading through so much garbage and over hyped mediocrity just isn't worth it. The dreck of the past is mostly filtered out for us already, simply by the passage of time and the survival of quality.
I don't think that it's necessarily true, but the big problem is that discoverability is almost impossible, and that the investment to know how good a book might be is much higher than other forms of media. It's also why you might get more out of books, you have to make some efforts to ingest them, but this means it's a problem if you have no idea how good it might be.
I like the term “organic literature.” A significant amount of readers have no interest whatsoever in
generated prose, so there is definitely a viable market in human provenance.
An independent certification body is quite an old-world solution for a problem like this, but I’m not sure this is something that can be done mathematically. A web of trust may be all we have.
Unfortunately, like most other kinds of commercial art, the mere presence of generated literature waters down the market enough to make actual literature essentially a leisure activity. Sure there was always crap, derivative filler books — it’s just that the ratio will now be 1000x worse and the better of the books just won’t justify the funding for intensive work and novel research that they used to, so even the good ones will probably be worse. Yet another example of the efficiency-obsessed more cheaper > less more expensive mentality making our world worse.
My last novel took over a year to write and edit, going through dozens of revisions. The novel before that took almost five years.
For a laugh I used grok to generate a 35,000-word slop novel, it took twenty prompts and a few hours, it even threw in a nice cover. From there it would have took me another 30 minutes to release it as an ebook on Amazon under a different pen-name. This is what I and the world of indie authors are up against. It is already hard for non-established authors, this may be the final nail in the coffin for most. My first book is now free, but good luck anyone ever finding it.
We need this for technical books. I was a chapter into something the other day before deciding I’d been hoodwinked into reading someone’s ChatGPT output
I've noticed entire publishers on Amazon which are just fly-by-night AI slop, probably printed on-demand too.
For example, I stumbled on https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DT4TKY58 and had never heard of the author. Their page (https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B004LUETE8) suggested they were incredibly prolific in a huge number of areas which already felt off. No information about "Robert Johnson" was available either. The publisher, HiTeX Press (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=HiTeX+Press) has a few other authors with similarly generic names and no information available about them, each the author of numerous books spanning a huge array of topics.
It feels even more bewildering and disheartening to see AI slop come into the physical world like this.
The world of literature is increasingly making itself inaccessible to broad audiences by turning this into a zero-sum game.
I wish OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini would all figure out how to pay royalties to copyright holders anytime their content is used. I see absolutely no reason why they can't do this. It would really take all the steam out of these hardline anti-AI positions.
So ... every time a model is used? Because it has been trained on these works so they have some influence on all its weights?
> I see absolutely no reason why they can't do this
They didn't even pay to access the works in the first place, frankly the chances of them paying now seems pretty minimal, without being forced to by the courts.
Why go after the AI company? If someone is using the AI generated content for commercial purposes and it’s based of a copyrighted work, they are the ones who should be paying the royalty.
The AI company is really more like a vector search company that brings you relevant content, kind of like Google, but that does not mean the user will use those results for commercial purposes. Google doesn’t pay royalties for displaying your website in search results.
I think we will be seeing a lot more business pop up that will take cater to people who are unhappy with AI. Especially if you consider the large amount of inevitable layoffs, people will begin to resent everything AI. The intelligent machine was never supposed to replace laborers, it was supposed to do your dishes and laundry.
I'm down for this, but only if the people who are getting paid by OpenAI/etc also turn around and pay any inspiration they've had, any artist they've copied from, etc over their entire life. If we're going to do this, we need to do it in a logically consistent way; anyone who's derived art from pre-existing art needs to pay the pre-existing artist, and I mean ALL of it, for anything derivative.
I've had this idea kicking around in my head now for a few months that this is an opportunity to update copyright / IP law generally, and use the size and scope of government to do something about both the energy costs of AI and compensation for people whose works are used. At a very rough draft and high level it goes something like this:
Update copyright to an initial 10 year limit, granted at publication without any need to register. This 10 year period also works just like copyright today, the characters, places, everything is projected. After 10 years, your entire work falls into the public domain.
Alternatively, you can register your copyright with the government within the first 3 years. This requires submitting your entire work in a machine readable specified format for integration into official training sets and models. These data sets and models will be licensed by the government for some fee to interested parties. As a creator with material submitted to this data set, you will receive some portion of those licensing feed, proportional to the quantity and amount of time your material has been in the set, with some caps set to prevent abuse. I imagine this would work something like the broadcast licensing for radios works. You will receive these licensing fees for up to 20 years from the first date of copyright.
During the first 10 years, copyright is still enforced on your work for all the same things that would normally be covered. For the 10 years after that, in additional consideration for adding your work to the data sets, you will be granted an additional weaker copyright term. The details would vary by the work, but for a novel for example, this might still protect the specific characters and creatures you created, but no longer offer protection on the "universe" you created. If we imagine Star Wars being created under this scheme, while Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa might still be protected from 1987-1997, The Empire, Tatooine, and Star Destroyers might not be.
What I envision here is that these government data sets would be known good, clean, properly categorized and in the case of models, the training costs have already been paid once. Rather than everyone doing a mad dash to scrape all the world's content, or buy up their own collection of books to be scanned and processed, all of that work could already have been done and it's just a license fee away. Additionally because we're building up an archive of media, we could also license custom data sets. Maybe someone wants to make a model trained on only cartoons, or only mystery novels or what have you. The data is already there, a nominal fee can get you that data, or maybe even have something trained up, and all the people who have contributed to that data are getting something for their work, but we're also not hamstringing our data sets to being decades or more out of date because Disney talked the government into century long copyrights decades ago.
I disagree. AI use is diffuse. An author is specific. Having people label their work as AI free is accountable in a way trying to require AI-generated work be labeled is not.
> similar to those found in cigarettes
Hyperbole undermines your argument. We have decades of rigorous and international evidence for the harms from cigarettes. We don’t for AI.
Even if every single page was hand written on camera, that could not prove that no AI was used.
Did the author come up with the main ideas, character arcs or plot devices himself? Did he ever seek assistance from AI to come up with new plot points, rewrite paragraphs, create dialog?
This depends on the subject of the book, but there are enough books written pre-1970 (or some other year one is comfortable with, before the era of “book spinners”, AI etc) to last multiple lifetimes. I used to spend hours and hours in bookstores, but so many books these days (AI or otherwise) don’t seem that interesting. Many, many books could just be 3 page articles, but stretched to 150 page books.
So yeah, simply filtering by year published could be a start
The normal writing 'journey' is several months, or years, of hard work and multiple revisions. I invest a little of my time explaining the journey on my blog, and also include the text in the prefix of my novels that it was written by a real human. It is my way of saying I was invested in the story, but it is pretty naive to think this will work in the age of AI today.
I also wrote an article on my blog that you are mainly writing for yourself and your family, friends and followers these days, the algorithm is very unlikely to get you outside of that word-of-mouth audience, unless you pay $$, go full-in promoting on social media (which may backfire), or are extremely lucky. With AI the algorithm has become the enemy and finding genuine indie authors is unfortunately getting harder.
This has the same problems any DRM has. People who want to bypass the process will find a way, but legitimate people get caught up in weird messes.
I'm so happy I'm not doing any school/academic work anymore, because AI writing detection tools (I learned English though reading technical docs; of course my writing style is a bit clinical) and checking the edit history in a Google Docs document would've both fucked me over.
This idealistic objective is highly commendable, but the fight could be futile. As you would need AI to do the work of detection. Then there will be another movement to do "organic detection" of "organic content". And the story goes on.
Think of interview candidates rejected by AI and employees fired by AI, or that case where a snack pack was identified by AI as a weapon in a student's pocket. This will lead to "organic decision making".
I love that they show an image of Kerouac's On the Eoad.. it's such a great example of a book that you know is based on real lived experience and that just comes to life as a wild and cacophonous daydream.
Knowing that some mad person wrote it is critical to its appeal
In 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, I set a timer, wrote for 10 minutes, live-streamed it, did it three times per day, for 35 days, and put everything unedited into a book.
It seems as if it may be more relevant in our AI writing times.
I too am open for business, for a modest fee I will arrange to meet a book publisher in nyc for a firm handshake to cement a declaration from them that they are publishing books not made with AI. I will then send a formal email saying they may publish a little gold star on their book, and my preeminence as a member of the literary elite should carry it through. I'm doing this for the people because I _care_.
I wonder how this works since authors are more and more likely to use AI to spell check, fix wording, find alternate words, and all manner of other things. It might be useful to understand the “rules” for what “human” means.
What is the point of this? Any publishing house can just "self certify" that no AI was used. Why would it be necessary to have an outside organization, who can not validate AI use anyway and just has to rely on the publisher.
Writing a book is, in most cases, something which happens between the author and their writing medium, how could any publisher verify anything about AI use, except in the most obvious cases?
The one thing which matters here is honesty and trust and I do not see how an outside organization could help in creating that honesty and maintaining that trust.
I don't care if AI wrote the book, if the book is good. The problem is that AI writes badly and pointlessly. It's not even a good editor, it 1) has no idea what you are talking about, and 2) if it catches some theme, it thinks the best thing to do is to repeat it over and over again and make it very, very clear. The reason you want to avoid LLM books is the same reason why you should avoid Gladwell books.
If a person who I know has taste signs off on a 100% AI book, I'll happily give it a spin. That person, to me, becomes the author as soon as they say that it's work that they would put their name on. The book has become an upside-down urinal. I'm not sure AI books are any different than cut-ups, other than somebody signed a cut-up. I've really enjoyed some cut-ups and stupid experiments, and really projected a lot onto them.
My experience in running things I've written through GPT-5 is that my angry reaction to its rave reviews, or its clumsy attempts to expand or rewrite, are stimulating in and of themselves. They often convince me to rewrite in order to throw the LLM even farther off the trail.
Maybe a lot of modern writers are looking for a certification because a lot of what they turn out is indistinguishable cliché, drawn from their experiences watching television in middle-class suburbs and reading the work of newspaper movie critics.
Lastly, everything about this site looks like it was created by AI.
> I don't care if AI wrote the book, if the book is good.
Not so sure. Books are not all just entertainment but they also develop one's ouook on life, relationships, morality etc. I mean, of course books can also be written by "bad" people to propagate their view of things, but at least you're still peeking into the views and distilled experience of a fellow human who lived a personal life.
Who knows what values a book implicitly espouses that has no author and was optimized for being liked by readers. Do that on a large enough scale and it's really hard to tell what kind of effect it has.
This is a big problem, though I would be slow to trust anyone purporting to address this problem. (Though, to their credit, this Books by People team is more credible than the bog-standard pair of 20yo Bay Area techbro grifters I expected.)
Reportedly, Kindle has already been flooded with "AI" generated books. And I've heard complaints from authors, of AI superficial rewritings of their own books being published by scammers. (So, not only "AI, write a YA novel, to the market, about a coming of age vampire young woman small town friends-to-lovers romance", but "AI, write a new novel in the style of Jane Smith, basically laundering previous things she's written" and "AI, copy the top-ranked fiction books in each category on Amazon, and substitute names of things, and how things are worded.")
For now, Kindle is already requiring publishers/authors to certify on which aspects of the books AI tools were used (e.g., text, illustrations, covers), something about how the tools were used (e.g., outright generation, assistive with heavy human work, etc.), and which tools were used. So that self-reporting is already being done somewhere, just not exposed to buyers yet.
That won't stop the dishonest, but at least it will help keep the honest writers honest. For example, if you, an honest writer, consider for a moment using generative AI to first-draft a scene, an awareness that you're required to disclose that generative AI use will give you pause, and maybe you decide that's not a direction you want to go with your work, nor how you want to be known.
Incidentally, I've noticed a lot of angry anti-generative-AI sentiment among creatives like writers and artists. Much more than among us techbros. Maybe the difference is that techbros are generally positioning ourselves to profit from AI, from copyright violations, selling AI products to others, and investment scams.
Just another rent-seeker. I mostly choose books based on word of mouth recommendations or liking other things by the same author. This is very resistant to slop from AI and to the large amounts of rubbish that has always been published.
Books written by AI is yet another case of an application of AI that does nothing to solve existing problems that consumers have (too few books in this case) but instead focuses on the producer side of things.
Worse yet, increasing the quantity of books while simultaneously decreasing the quality just makes the situation worse for readers: more slop to filter out.
[+] [-] avazhi|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mabedan|4 months ago|reply
Well said. It’s also true for movies these days which are predictable and algorithm tailored minus a couple of directors.
[+] [-] phainopepla2|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] woolion|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tinkelenberg|4 months ago|reply
An independent certification body is quite an old-world solution for a problem like this, but I’m not sure this is something that can be done mathematically. A web of trust may be all we have.
[+] [-] DrewADesign|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] boznz|4 months ago|reply
For a laugh I used grok to generate a 35,000-word slop novel, it took twenty prompts and a few hours, it even threw in a nice cover. From there it would have took me another 30 minutes to release it as an ebook on Amazon under a different pen-name. This is what I and the world of indie authors are up against. It is already hard for non-established authors, this may be the final nail in the coffin for most. My first book is now free, but good luck anyone ever finding it.
[+] [-] shakabrah|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] PessimalDecimal|4 months ago|reply
For example, I stumbled on https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DT4TKY58 and had never heard of the author. Their page (https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B004LUETE8) suggested they were incredibly prolific in a huge number of areas which already felt off. No information about "Robert Johnson" was available either. The publisher, HiTeX Press (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=HiTeX+Press) has a few other authors with similarly generic names and no information available about them, each the author of numerous books spanning a huge array of topics.
It feels even more bewildering and disheartening to see AI slop come into the physical world like this.
[+] [-] jarjoura|4 months ago|reply
I wish OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini would all figure out how to pay royalties to copyright holders anytime their content is used. I see absolutely no reason why they can't do this. It would really take all the steam out of these hardline anti-AI positions.
[+] [-] Nursie|4 months ago|reply
So ... every time a model is used? Because it has been trained on these works so they have some influence on all its weights?
> I see absolutely no reason why they can't do this
They didn't even pay to access the works in the first place, frankly the chances of them paying now seems pretty minimal, without being forced to by the courts.
[+] [-] deadbabe|4 months ago|reply
The AI company is really more like a vector search company that brings you relevant content, kind of like Google, but that does not mean the user will use those results for commercial purposes. Google doesn’t pay royalties for displaying your website in search results.
[+] [-] chrisulloa|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] CuriouslyC|4 months ago|reply
Good luck with that.
[+] [-] tpmoney|4 months ago|reply
Update copyright to an initial 10 year limit, granted at publication without any need to register. This 10 year period also works just like copyright today, the characters, places, everything is projected. After 10 years, your entire work falls into the public domain.
Alternatively, you can register your copyright with the government within the first 3 years. This requires submitting your entire work in a machine readable specified format for integration into official training sets and models. These data sets and models will be licensed by the government for some fee to interested parties. As a creator with material submitted to this data set, you will receive some portion of those licensing feed, proportional to the quantity and amount of time your material has been in the set, with some caps set to prevent abuse. I imagine this would work something like the broadcast licensing for radios works. You will receive these licensing fees for up to 20 years from the first date of copyright.
During the first 10 years, copyright is still enforced on your work for all the same things that would normally be covered. For the 10 years after that, in additional consideration for adding your work to the data sets, you will be granted an additional weaker copyright term. The details would vary by the work, but for a novel for example, this might still protect the specific characters and creatures you created, but no longer offer protection on the "universe" you created. If we imagine Star Wars being created under this scheme, while Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa might still be protected from 1987-1997, The Empire, Tatooine, and Star Destroyers might not be.
What I envision here is that these government data sets would be known good, clean, properly categorized and in the case of models, the training costs have already been paid once. Rather than everyone doing a mad dash to scrape all the world's content, or buy up their own collection of books to be scanned and processed, all of that work could already have been done and it's just a license fee away. Additionally because we're building up an archive of media, we could also license custom data sets. Maybe someone wants to make a model trained on only cartoons, or only mystery novels or what have you. The data is already there, a nominal fee can get you that data, or maybe even have something trained up, and all the people who have contributed to that data are getting something for their work, but we're also not hamstringing our data sets to being decades or more out of date because Disney talked the government into century long copyrights decades ago.
[+] [-] andrepd|4 months ago|reply
>hardline anti-AI position
Some people are beyond parody.
[+] [-] onetokeoverthe|4 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zorked|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|4 months ago|reply
I disagree. AI use is diffuse. An author is specific. Having people label their work as AI free is accountable in a way trying to require AI-generated work be labeled is not.
> similar to those found in cigarettes
Hyperbole undermines your argument. We have decades of rigorous and international evidence for the harms from cigarettes. We don’t for AI.
[+] [-] 3mc|4 months ago|reply
A recording of the entire process of it's creation is one possible answer (though how are deep fakes countered)
But maybe there is some cryptographic solution involving single direction provable timestamps..
Does anyone know of anyone working on such a thing?
[+] [-] constantcrying|4 months ago|reply
Did the author come up with the main ideas, character arcs or plot devices himself? Did he ever seek assistance from AI to come up with new plot points, rewrite paragraphs, create dialog?
The only thing which really matters is trust.
[+] [-] georgefrowny|4 months ago|reply
It's a social problem at heart and piling on yet more technology won't fix it.
[+] [-] haunter|4 months ago|reply
Are thoughts and ideas creations? Or you just mean the literal typewriting?
How do you prove an idea is original and you have been in a vacuum not influenced _by anything at all_?
If anything The Hunger Games is the perfect example that you can get away with anything you want, and that was almost 20 years ago.
Everything is a remix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc or if you hate your life https://tvtropes.org/
[+] [-] akudha|4 months ago|reply
So yeah, simply filtering by year published could be a start
[+] [-] boznz|4 months ago|reply
I also wrote an article on my blog that you are mainly writing for yourself and your family, friends and followers these days, the algorithm is very unlikely to get you outside of that word-of-mouth audience, unless you pay $$, go full-in promoting on social media (which may backfire), or are extremely lucky. With AI the algorithm has become the enemy and finding genuine indie authors is unfortunately getting harder.
[+] [-] kvirani|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|4 months ago|reply
Self certification backed by a war chest to sue those who lie.
[+] [-] nvr219|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Papazsazsa|4 months ago|reply
People will know by reputation alone, which cannot be fabricated.
[+] [-] asmor|4 months ago|reply
I'm so happy I'm not doing any school/academic work anymore, because AI writing detection tools (I learned English though reading technical docs; of course my writing style is a bit clinical) and checking the edit history in a Google Docs document would've both fucked me over.
[+] [-] zkmon|4 months ago|reply
Think of interview candidates rejected by AI and employees fired by AI, or that case where a snack pack was identified by AI as a weapon in a student's pocket. This will lead to "organic decision making".
[+] [-] Papazsazsa|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|4 months ago|reply
Why?
[+] [-] redwood|4 months ago|reply
Knowing that some mad person wrote it is critical to its appeal
[+] [-] jimkleiber|4 months ago|reply
It seems as if it may be more relevant in our AI writing times.
[+] [-] Avicebron|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] codazoda|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] constantcrying|4 months ago|reply
Writing a book is, in most cases, something which happens between the author and their writing medium, how could any publisher verify anything about AI use, except in the most obvious cases?
The one thing which matters here is honesty and trust and I do not see how an outside organization could help in creating that honesty and maintaining that trust.
[+] [-] pessimizer|4 months ago|reply
If a person who I know has taste signs off on a 100% AI book, I'll happily give it a spin. That person, to me, becomes the author as soon as they say that it's work that they would put their name on. The book has become an upside-down urinal. I'm not sure AI books are any different than cut-ups, other than somebody signed a cut-up. I've really enjoyed some cut-ups and stupid experiments, and really projected a lot onto them.
My experience in running things I've written through GPT-5 is that my angry reaction to its rave reviews, or its clumsy attempts to expand or rewrite, are stimulating in and of themselves. They often convince me to rewrite in order to throw the LLM even farther off the trail.
Maybe a lot of modern writers are looking for a certification because a lot of what they turn out is indistinguishable cliché, drawn from their experiences watching television in middle-class suburbs and reading the work of newspaper movie critics.
Lastly, everything about this site looks like it was created by AI.
[+] [-] bonoboTP|4 months ago|reply
Not so sure. Books are not all just entertainment but they also develop one's ouook on life, relationships, morality etc. I mean, of course books can also be written by "bad" people to propagate their view of things, but at least you're still peeking into the views and distilled experience of a fellow human who lived a personal life.
Who knows what values a book implicitly espouses that has no author and was optimized for being liked by readers. Do that on a large enough scale and it's really hard to tell what kind of effect it has.
[+] [-] neilv|4 months ago|reply
Reportedly, Kindle has already been flooded with "AI" generated books. And I've heard complaints from authors, of AI superficial rewritings of their own books being published by scammers. (So, not only "AI, write a YA novel, to the market, about a coming of age vampire young woman small town friends-to-lovers romance", but "AI, write a new novel in the style of Jane Smith, basically laundering previous things she's written" and "AI, copy the top-ranked fiction books in each category on Amazon, and substitute names of things, and how things are worded.")
For now, Kindle is already requiring publishers/authors to certify on which aspects of the books AI tools were used (e.g., text, illustrations, covers), something about how the tools were used (e.g., outright generation, assistive with heavy human work, etc.), and which tools were used. So that self-reporting is already being done somewhere, just not exposed to buyers yet.
That won't stop the dishonest, but at least it will help keep the honest writers honest. For example, if you, an honest writer, consider for a moment using generative AI to first-draft a scene, an awareness that you're required to disclose that generative AI use will give you pause, and maybe you decide that's not a direction you want to go with your work, nor how you want to be known.
Incidentally, I've noticed a lot of angry anti-generative-AI sentiment among creatives like writers and artists. Much more than among us techbros. Maybe the difference is that techbros are generally positioning ourselves to profit from AI, from copyright violations, selling AI products to others, and investment scams.
[+] [-] unknown|4 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] harvey9|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickjd|4 months ago|reply
Worse yet, increasing the quantity of books while simultaneously decreasing the quality just makes the situation worse for readers: more slop to filter out.
[+] [-] ctoth|4 months ago|reply
So this is the thing that Zitron and Doctorow are always talking about? Naked grifting in the AI industry?
[+] [-] lux_sprwhk|4 months ago|reply
[deleted]