Responding to online criticism, Barnes & Noble ceo James Daunt tempered remarks he made earlier this week in a Today Show interview, in which he said that the chain would stock AI-created books as long as they were clearly labeled. “I have actually no problem selling any book, as long as it doesn’t masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn’t, and that it has an essential quality to it, and that the customer, the reader, wants it,” Daunt told book club host and imprint publisher Jenna Bush Hager. “So as long as an AI-written book says it’s an […]
AI
Pirated, AI-Produced Audiobooks Proliferate on YouTube; AAP Partners With Vermillio to Fight It
Pirated, AI-voiced audiobooks are popping up all over YouTube, creating a copyright infringement problem for publishers. The users posting the videos are able to include ads, and make money off of the books. The New York Times reports that a YouTube version of John Grisham’s latest novel The Widow, featuring an “emotionally flat, robotic” AI-generated voice has over 80,000 views. The images that go along with the book, which is about “small-town lawyer in rural Virginia who finds himself on trial for murder” are nonsensical and include: “a waterfall, a family picnicking on a tropical beach, people snorkeling around a coral […]
Checking Fourteen Years of Commonwealth Prize-Winning Stories, Only Recent Ones Are Flagged By AI Detector
In the continuing conversation about possible AI use in winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Atlantic asked a Pangram research scientist to put all of the past winning stories into the AI detector. (In a separate Atlantic podcast, Pangram co-founder Max Spero claims that the tool has a 1-in-10,000 false-positive rate.) Only four stories in the prize’s 14-year history were flagged as being wholly or partly AI-generated—three stories from this year and one from last year. The magazine states, “100 percent of the text in [Jamir] Nazir’s and [Edward DeMicoli]’s stories was flagged as likely to have been […]
Criticism Over AI in Creation Hits Nobel Winner, a Book About AI, and a UK Prize
What a week yesterday was, as several controversies over AI use in book publishing emerged. During the Poznań Impact event in Poland, Nobel laureate in literature Olga Tokarczuk said that she used AI while working on her next novel, as reported by My Company Polska. Tokarczuk said that she asked an LLM what songs her characters might have danced to in the past. She also expressed support for the technology as a useful tool for writers. “I often throw an idea to the machine for analysis, asking, ‘Honey, how could we develop this beautifully?’,” she said. “Even though I know […]
Commonwealth Foundation and Granta Stand By Short Story After AI Accusations
One winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize has been accused of being AI-generated. Online posts have noted that the AI checker Pangram rated “The Serpent in the Grove” by Jamir Nazir as 100 percent AI-created. Critics of AI detectors note that they are not always accurate; Pangram is among the more well-respected tools. The prize honors five unpublished short stories from the British Commonwealth of Nations. Granta published all five winning stories online. “Granta editors were not involved with these stories or their selection beyond copy-editing them upon receipt,” a spokesperson for the magazine said. “We are alarmed by the speculation that […]
Retailers Lack Effective Tools to Combat AI Slop
A research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research confirms what consumers and publishers have long been aware of: There’s more AI slop for sale than ever. Based on an analysis of Amazon data—which, they say, dominates the global ebook market with more than two-thirds of the market share—the NBER notes that the number of new books available nearly tripled between 2022 and 2025, which coincides with the incidence of AI used in books. “Detected AI use is roughly zero through 2022, rises to 30 percent in 2023, to 45 percent in 2024, and surpasses 60 percent during 2025,” […]