Observers are weighing the potential effect of chatbots on the publishing industry, as works written by or with an assist from artificial intelligence come to market. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing arm currently lists more than 200 e-books that credit OpenAI’s ChatGPT as author or co-author on topics ranging from stories for children to self-help, science fiction and poetry. Tutorials on how to use AI to create publishable work in a few hours have sprung up on YouTube, TikTok and Reddit. As with all things AI, this trend has prompted equal amounts of curiosity and concern.

“This is something we really need to be worried about, these books will flood the market and a lot of authors are going to be out of work,” Authors Guild executive director Mary Rasenberger told Reuters, warning that automated book generation could degrade authorship from a craft to a commodity.

“One author, who goes by Frank White, showed in a YouTube video how in less than a day he created a 119-page novella called ‘Galactic Pimp: Vol. 1’ about alien factions in a far-off galaxy warring over a human-staffed brothel,” reports Reuters, noting White says “anyone with the wherewithal and time could create 300 such books a year” using AI. His sells for $1 on Amazon’s Kindle e-book store.

Because Amazon has no policy requiring disclosure for the use of AI, many feel the number of books that have used AI is actually much higher than what is being reported.

Science-fiction publisher Clarkesworld Magazine “has temporarily halted short-story submissions,” having in February alone banned “over 500 users” for submitting content suspected of being created using AI without disclosure, writes Engadget. Editor Neil Clarke says he can identify AI-assists based on “some very obvious patterns.”

Clarke and others worry what will happen when the technology improves to the point where “detection will become more challenging.” Amazon, the largest seller of books in digital and print, “commanding well over half” of U.S. sales and “over 80 percent of the e-book market,” has no current plans to require AI disclosure, Reuters notes.

The trend is also affecting journalism. Last month, CNET suspended an experiment publishing AI-created articles after finding instances of factual error and apparent plagiarism. ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms are trained to write by ingesting millions of pages of existing text, scanned from the Internet and elsewhere.