AI books: Bookstores steering clear of books written by bots

Bookstores rely on publishers to ensure the books they sell aren't written by AI.

New Zealand booksellers are steering clear of books written by artificial intelligence (AI), but are ultimately relying on publishers to ensure they don’t end up on the shelves.

Bot-generated books are becoming increasingly common, with many public libraries now open to offering them in the future if there is strong public demand.

But the national Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand association said bookstores are focused on selling human-written books – those where AI has only been used for grammar, spell-checking and research.

“We don’t have the requisite regulation around the use of AI and the publishing model – it’s very grey,” association manager Renee Rowland said.

“It’s a high trust model – we trust that the publishers are going to sell us books written by humans. When there’s a self-published book, they’re subject to intense scrutiny by booksellers, but again... we’re taking people at their word.”

Rowland said selling human-created works was core to the purpose of a bookstore.

“Booksellers are in the market for stories which are innately human product. The idea of selling a story written by a robot or artificial intelligence is just against everything we do.”

Some overseas online platforms have been flooded with books written by AI bots, often paraphrasing, imitating or summarising an existing work or group of works.

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform has responded by requiring self-publishers to disclose AI-generated content and preventing them from publishing more than three books a day.

An Amazon spokesperson told Newstalk ZB it had guidelines in place for all content and had “proactive and reactive methods” to detect content that violated those standards.

“We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines.

“We continue to enhance our protections against non-compliant content, and our process and guidelines will keep evolving as we see changes in AI-driven publishing.”

Rowland said AI could have huge advantages in addressing New Zealand’s productivity problem, but there needed to be more discussion about regulation and the potential impact of AI on intellectual property.

“There’s been a huge amount of theft by systems using AI. We’re fundamentally opposed to that and condemn that kind of that theft and that piracy,” she said.

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