Everyone Is Writing a Novel, Even ChatGPT
The rise of widely available, easy-to-use artificial intelligence tools is creating a new genre of robot-generated literature. Amazon already offers over 200 books (and climbing) with ChatGPT listed as an author or co-author.
The reasons for people to "write" these books varies. Some authors were previously discouraged by the time and effort to write a book, and are now turning to ChatGPT to generate short novels in hours. They are also combining text generated by ChatGPT with illustrations from platforms such as DALL-E, and bringing their creations to market instantly online.
"The idea of writing a book finally seemed possible," Brett Schickler, a salesman in Rochester, New York, tells(Opens in a new window) Reuters. "I thought 'I can do this.'" He created a 30-page illustrated children's e-book in hours by using ChatGPT to generate blocks of text from his prompts. The book, now listed on Amazon for $2.99 on Kindle or $9.99 printed, aims to teach kids about saving money. The main character is Sammy the Squirrel, who collects and invests acorns.
Schickler does not list ChatGPT as an author on the front or back cover. The product page(Opens in a new window) also does not mention ChatGPT, nor the platform he used to create illustrations.
Amazon's policies do not currently require authors to disclose this. The e-commerce giant controls as much as 80% of the e-book market, Reuters notes, meaning a large volume of readers may find themselves unknowingly reading computer-generated work to their children or discussing it in book club groups.
The desire to easily create a book on ChatGPT echoes sentiments from the editor of science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, Neil Clarke, who recently shut down submissions after a spike in
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