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" Noble gesture?
Well, why not?
July 27, 2026 //
The New York Times has an interesting article by Kashmir Hill, about her reaction to discovering a 90-page AI biography of herself on Amazon. Here’s a link to the piece at The San Francisco Examiner. To say the biography wasn’t very good understates the case: just a collection of a few disparate facts and fictions cobbled together by AI. What makes a person make such a book? Ms Hill tries to locate the author of her biography but manages only to find another "writer", Bill Jones, who publishes ten AI-generated books a month on Amazon (the most they’ll allow) — he now has 445 books available on Amazon. He is quite content to sell few copies of any one of them, even in several cases, no copies at all. Indeed he claims if he gets a really negative review of one of his books he takes the offending volume down. "I don’t take [the reviews] personally" he says, and as Ms Hill comments "Why would he? He didn’t, technically speaking, write the book." He compiles his books as a pastime in his retirement "I wouldn’t characterize them as flying off the shelves" he said, "but it’s bar money at least."
Inevitably these AI-generated books are not very good — though I suppose just like those monkeys typing Shakespeare, it must be at least theoretically possible that an AI-generated book could end up being a worthwhile book. But that’s not the point, is it? Nobody is pretending these books are "good". Even Amazon, which is happy to overlook the "problem" for most of the time, will take down a book which is heavily criticized by customers. The point is, people will buy this sort of stuff. If you stand on a street corner waving dollar bills for long enough someone will soon enough appear willing to take the money even if they don’t have anything of value to swap for it. We keep getting bombarded by articles telling us that nobody reads any more, yet crap like this is being bought every day. Obviously people are willing and eager to read — and, sorry commentators, they clearly are reading, even if some of the stuff they’re reading isn’t great. (I suspect there is a fair bit of value judgement in those articles about how hoi poloi can’t read any more — only we, cultural commentators that we are, are smart enough to grapple with War and Peace!)
In so far as there’s demand for AI-generated slop, producing it is surely a perfectly legitimate endeavor. Moral judgement is beside the point. If some book buyers don’t care, why should not the enterprising entrepreneur satisfy the demand? It’s not as if the existence of bad books somehow imperils the quality of good books. You read what you chose to read. If you just want to buy a football-fan friend a birthday present of a book which you suspect they’ll never read, what does it matter that Bill Jones’ College Football Dynasties is "littered with mistakes throughout and the author tends to ramble on and be very repetitive"? It’s the thought that counts. Of course Mr Jones probably never rambles: ChatGPT’s the one who’s guilty as charged. But so what?
For more ranting on the ethics of AI writing, please see also "Shy Girl" fiasco.
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Categories Self publishing, Writing
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ThadMcIlroy says:
July 27, 2026 at 2:18 pm
Related, a just-released study: "Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books"
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.20349
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