It is likely that the number of books written by the AI chatbot ChatGPT is much larger, since Amazon policy does not explicitly require authors to disclose information about the use of artificial intelligence.
Reuters writes that the chatbot’s authorship is listed in 200 books in the Kindle Store. This is one of the latest use cases for ChatGPT, which gained a lot of publicity after OpenAI made it available for free in November.
“I’ve seen people make a whole career out of it. The idea of writing a book is finally more feasible,” said Brett Shikler, a Rochester, New York-based retailer who published a children’s book on the Kindle Store.
Shikler’s creation, The Wise Little Squirrel: A Story of Savings and Investment, is a 30-page children’s book written and illustrated by AI that sells for $2.99 digitally and $9.99 print. Although Brett says the book has brought him less than $100 since it was published in January, he spent several hours creating it. The author used ChatGPT prompts like: “write a story about a dad teaching his son financial literacy”
Other examples of AI-generated Kindle Store content include the children’s story The Power of Homework, the poetry book Echoes of the Universe, and the interstellar brothel sci-fi epic Galactic Pimp Volume 1.
“That’s something to worry about. These books will flood the market, and many writers will be out of work. Authors and platforms should disclose how such works are written. Otherwise, we will end up with a lot of low quality books,” said Mary Rosenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild.
Meanwhile, the American online fantasy and science fiction magazine Clarkesworld Magazine suspended submissions of short stories after a spate of articles suspected of using AI without warning. The publication’s editor, Neil Clark, says he identified the stories created by the chatbot due to “some very obvious patterns,” but did not elaborate on which ones.
“I can say that this month the number of blocked spam messages has reached 38%. Although it was easy to reject and ban the submission – the number of such materials is growing, so other additional measures are required. Even more dangerous, the technology will only get better, so it will be harder to identify AI works,” he says.
Clarkesworld is now banning the submission of stories “written by or co-written by AI”. This month, the publication banned more than 500 users for submitting content likely created by artificial intelligence. Clarkesworld pays 12 cents per word, which is a clear money-making opportunity.
From what I can tell, it’s not about credibility. It’s about the possibility of making a quick buck. That’s all they care about.
— clarkesworld (@clarkesworld) February 20, 2023
However, questions again arise regarding the veracity of the information provided by artificial intelligence, or possible plagiarism. For example, ChatGPT and Bard can “hallucinate”, that is, confidently pass off a lie as a fact. In addition, chatbots learn from content created by humans—often without the knowledge or permission of the original author—and sometimes use identical syntax to the source material.
Last year, technical publication CNET used its own artificial intelligence model to create at least 70 economic articles. In addition to a clever approach to reporting AI authorship (only if the reader clicked on the author’s line), the works contained numerous factual errors and almost identical phrases from other sites. As a result, CNET made corrections and suspended the use of the tool, but one of the sister sites has already at least experimented with its reuse.
Source: Engadget
