This German platform similar to Wattpad offers its 33 million young users to read romances co -written by Claude and Chatgpt.
“The abandoned alpha”, “the astral companion”, “the lonely white wolf” or even “obsessive lazy”. By scrolling once on the Inkitt platform, we know where we are. The online bookstore based in Germany and specializing in romance more or less operates the same functioning as the American Wattpad, namely the free provision of thousands of stories written by young authors who are launching.
With more than 33 million readers for more than half a million active authors, the startup launched by Ali Albazaz is a hit to the point of raising $ 34 million in January 2024. Its objective? Become the “Disney” of the 21st century, that is to say a cultural factory as well literary and audiovisual with the production of mini-centers disseminated on its Galatea TV platform and on social media. And to achieve this goal, Inkitt does not hesitate to resort to large models of language like Claude or Chatgpt.
The “Books” factory that monitors reading
As a article of TechCrunchthe application uses “AI and data science” to select the most convincing stories, “refine” them and then distribute and sell them on its second paid application, Galatea. Behind what could already look like a heresy for many artists refractory to AI is in fact hiding an operating system of the rather mind -blowing authors, which is told in detail by the journalist Vauhini Vara on Bloomberg.
His survey reveals that the platform has set up a reader monitoring system of readers to determine what are the habits of users, but also the specific passages of a chapter that caught their attention, or not. Based on this data, the company is able to “guide” the writing of the following chapters and books. This is what happened in Manjari Sharma, a young author who was a good success with her first book Fat Keilyadapted in a paid book as well as in mini-series.
The latter says that her first work was published for the first time on Galatea before being taken up by an editorial director helped by LLM, who identified the “less interesting” passages from the novel and proposed tracks of improvement. These suggestions are then sent to A/B testing on the platform, which means that readers do not really read the same book. At the end, it is the most “efficient” version that replaces the modified passages.
“Claude, write me a romance with a wolf Garou”
The use of LLM does not stop at rewriting. After the success of the first volume, the publisher asked Manjari to write the aftermath, “in a few weeks”. Faced with the difficulty of the task, she entrusts this writing to ghostwriters proposed by the platform, which will lay two other books on behalf of AI. Asked about the change of style and quality of the consequences, Dami Ekpe, vice-president of content at Inkitt, explains that intrigue ideas were generated by LLM, then sent to an independent ghostwriter, itself helped by AI, previously trained in the author of the author.
Given the relatively “recurring” and homogeneous nature of romance structures, AI is perfectly capable of helping the generation (can we still speak of writing?) Of chapters supposed to fuel the greed of readers. But this race for production assisted by IA ends up being at the expense of the authors, who denounce, in the Bloomberg survey, a form of exploitation with rights lower than the average (6 % of the income generated on the paid platform against 25 % in conventional publishing houses and 5 % of the rights for a video adaptation).
The boss of Inkitt does not intend to stop there. He imagines the future of publishing with different productions, more or less written by humans, updated regularly depending on the news and cultural changes, even entirely generated by a battery of artificial authors. To overcome the lack of value of these artificial writings, Albazaz plans to transform users of the platform into prompters that can generate books by writing a few key points of the plot. These stories would then be distributed with names of authors, also artificial, but acting as brands, human benchmarks for readers. What make the truly human authors shudder, who see in this story the disappearance of their profession … or the starting point of a superb dystopia which is written in real time before our eyes.
