Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
Generative AI can produce book-length works of fiction at near-zero cost. These books are often dismissed as low-quality ``slop'' that buyers will ignore, and are assumed to carry little commercial weight. We test that assumption with full-text AI detection across 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books sold on Amazon from 2023 to 2026, matched to daily sales records through June 2026. None of these books disclose whether or not they contain AI-produced content. We find that books for which we detected substantial AI text ($>$ 25\%) make up a large share of the catalog but a smaller share of sales. Even so, they reach commercial scale, winning a growing share of sales over time and taki...
| Authors | Tuhin Chakrabarty, Xinyue Liu, Jane C. Ginsburg et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 22 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 August 2026 |
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