Amazon has been seeing a lot of AI authors (and many more AI books) popping up lately. The company is now introducing measures.
AI is pretty much everywhere lately. Generative AI applications are able to develop content themselves based on an assignment. Reason enough for many people to let AI systems draw, paint, compose or even write. The latter could well become a problem for Amazon. The Kindle store, through which books for Kindle e-readers are sold, is being flooded with AI books.
3 books per day
This does not concern books about AI, but books written by AI. To combat the overabundance of AI material, Amazon is now placing a limit on how many books can be published per day. Anyone who wants to use Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service can now load up to three books per day. The limit applies to all Kindle publishers, whether they use AI or not. According to Amazon, the measure should help protect users.
Amazon worked out a policy for AI books on the Kindle platform over the past few weeks. The e-commerce giant clearly allows the books on the platform, although it must be stated when AI was used. Books that were written by AI, but then edited by humans, must also be declared as AI books. Furthermore, the works must follow the same rules as other books: copyright and trademarks must be respected, as well as privacy laws.
AI creates literature
The presence of AI in literature has encountered more opposition in recent weeks. The professional association for American authors, the Author’s Guild, recently sued OpenAI. The company is said to have violated copyright by allowing ChatGPT to read books by George RR Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult, among others. In other words: ChatGPT has read Game of Thrones, but its creator doesn’t find it particularly amusing. In addition, OpenAI is said to have obtained the books illegally.
By the way, no more books are published via Amazon than before. So not only are there more AI books, but fewer and fewer books are being published that did not involve a computer system. A few weeks ago, one of those books managed to attract attention: shortly after the fierce wildfires in Maui, a book about the disaster was published on Amazon. That book, which could be called a disaster in itself, reached the top of Amazon’s bestseller list in no time.
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