Want to win big by publishing a book surfing the news, written with the help of ChatGPT? Amazon is the ideal publisher for authors who use artificial intelligence (AI), but beware of disappointment for buyers.
This type of text of dubious quality was highlighted by a biography by Léon Gautier, a Frenchman who had participated in the Landing of June 6, 1944. Published two days after his death in July 2023, it was not only poorly written but “stuffed of errors” according to his family.
Anyone can sell their book on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Amazon’s self-publishing platform. Control is weak. And the potentially high profits: the authors receive 70% of the sale price of the electronic version.
If you type on Amazon “Paul Auster”, a writer who died on the evening of April 30, several biographies appear in English published the next day. They are 30 to 110 pages long.
The inventions in Léon Gautier’s biography, a book signed by an unknown woman, “Grace Shaw”, most likely come from the creativity of ChatGPT. When forced to write long texts on specialized subjects, the famous OpenAI software has no choice: it extrapolates and falls into fiction.
– “Stereotyped scenario” –
“ChatGPT can help generate detailed timelines of a character’s life, suggest memorable events that might have affected their development, and provide settings and backgrounds that give depth and coherence to their story,” we read in “How to Write Books Using ChatGPT,” a manual by Martin Arellano.
This work itself, published on KDP in 2023, seems to be written with the help of AI. Amazon has removed it from sale. And we find no details on the biography of this very verbose author, with half a dozen titles over the past year.
“There are plenty of tutorials that promise to get rich by publishing such books. You learn to ask ChatGPT for a stereotypical scenario, then pieces of book to paste one behind the other which will also lack originality”, explains Alexandre Gefen, research director at CNRS, to AFP.
“Children’s fiction corresponds well to what ChatGPT knows how to do, which is moral, very positive, which produces short texts. But we are very far from the inventiveness necessary to create the new Harry Potter”, adds the author of “Living with ChatGPT”.
The American online commerce giant, whose bookstore was the first market in 1995, says it is taking action against this phenomenon of hastily written works.
– “50 cent biography” –
“Last year, we began asking all publishers using our Kindle Direct Publishing service to indicate whether their content is generated using artificial intelligence, and we further reduced the total number of titles that could be published per day,” an Amazon France spokesperson responded to AFP.
This limit, however, seems ridiculous to publishers, as the head of their professional organization, Vincent Montagne, suggested in mid-April. “If I remember correctly, Amazon even said: + I forbid an author from releasing more than three books per day +, which is still incredible,” he declared on France Culture.
Software like ChatGPT only “reproduces” what it observed, he believed. The president of the National Publishing Union therefore said he was more worried about the lack of remuneration for the real authors whose texts drive the OpenAI machines, than about competition from false authors.
Some comply with the obligation to mention that “this book was generated by artificial intelligence”, a negligible part of the overall offer and which probably does not reflect the reality of the volume written mainly by ChatGPT.
Amazon says it has hunted in genres where ChatGPT is king, such as digests of novels that have fallen into the public domain or “workbooks based on existing titles”.
According to Alexandre Gefen, in literature, “this is not a massive and worrying phenomenon. For the moment, ChatGPT is not capable of organizing a complex story that would garner many positive reviews.” But this mode of writing “works well for certain specific segments, like a 50-cent biography.”
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