AI-generated books are proliferating across Amazon
An Originality.AI analysis of 2,034 religious books published on Amazon found that 1,272, or 63%, were flagged as likely written by large language models. Separately, a Stony Brook University-led study examined 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books sold on Amazon from 2023 through 2026 and found 2,880 had more than 25% of their prose flagged as AI.
The Stony Brook study found the number of books with observed quarterly sales increased 19.2-fold over three years, while quarterly revenue rose 8.9-fold, indicating lower revenue per selling book. Books without detected AI text lost the most ground in genres with higher AI diffusion.
Human Authors Squeezed
"The crowding-out effect generated by these books-most of which are low quality, but some of which are still good enough that they lead to higher ranks-due to this increased competition, they're likely to get squeezed, and their revenues are reduced," Paramveer Dhillon, an associate professor of information at the University of Michigan and study coauthor, told Fortune in a report published Monday.
Tuhin Chakrabarty, an assistant professor of computer science at Stony Brook University and study coauthor, told Fortune that an "algorithmic bubble" could make it harder for lesser-known human authors to appear in related-book listings as AI-generated titles gain visibility.
Amazon requires self-published authors to disclose AI-generated text and limits uploads to three titles per day. An Amazon spokesperson told Fortune the company uses safeguards to prevent, detect and remove books that violate its content guidelines.
The findings add to a debate over AI and copyrighted works. Coverage has highlighted legal disputes over whether AI companies can use copyrighted books and other material to train models, while an AI-generated reading-list incident showed how fabricated titles could surface in online search results.
