AI is pumping out books. Are they any good?

0:01NPR.

0:06Think about some of the Western world's most famously prolific writers. You have horror novelist Stephen King. He's written more than 60 best-selling books and hundreds of short stories.

0:16Sierra Juarez:There's also sci-fi author Isaac Asimov, who produced more than 500 fiction and nonfiction books. And also English romance novelist Barbara Cartland, who wrote more than 700 books during her career. So much swooning. But today, large language models or LLMs can match that kind of output in a single year. The number of new book releases on Amazon almost tripled between 2022 and 2025. That's an increase that can be attributed to LLMs. But are these AI-written books any good? This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrienne Ma. And I'm Waylon Wong. Today on the show, we tackle this quality question through an economic lens.

0:57Plus, we hear from a human editor at a niche publisher about how they're fighting the slop wars.

1:05Sierra Juarez:This message comes from Mattress Firm. If you're sleeping hot, Mattress Firm's sleep experts can match you with a Temper Breeze designed to deliver cooling comfort. Visit Mattress Firm and get$500 off Temper Breeze mattresses. Restrictions apply. See store for details. This message comes from LinkedIn. Owning a small business comes with a lot of challenges and means juggling multiple things at once. It's even harder to do it efficiently. But with LinkedIn, you get all the tools you need to grow in one place. With LinkedIn, simplify your sales, marketing, and hiring so that you can actually run your small business.

1:40Sierra Juarez:Learn more at linkedin.com slash indicator show. This message comes from Dell Technologies. Interruptions happen at work. But with the Dell Pro laptop, powered by Intel Core Ultra with V Pro, built with optimized battery and built-in intelligence, your tech won't slow you down. Dell.com slash Dell-Pro. Built for you. Economists Imka Reimers and Joel Walfogel have worked together for more than 15 years. Imka's at Cornell University and Joel's at the University of Minnesota. Together, they've studied how cultural products like music and books have gone digital. And sometimes this has involved some firsthand experience, as Imke explains.

2:23I tried out to see how easy it is to self-publish a book, not to try to sell any units, to be very clear. To just say, oh, yeah, I self-published a book. Please don't buy it. What was your book about? Oh, it was a half page about my day. It was nothing. I feel like you're underselling it, but OK. I really am not. Didn't you get two five-star reviews? Yes, because two people did not listen to my plea not to buy it.

2:48Sierra Juarez:Well, it sounds like Imka is part of this wave of self-publishing because the number of self-published books skyrocketed in 2008 following the launch of Amazon's Kindle e-reader. Then 2022 brought another big disruption. The widespread availability of large language models like ChachiBT. Imka and Joel wanted to see if this new technology was also leading to lots more books being published. And if there was an explosion in AI-generated books, were they any good? We'll come back to the issue of good in a bit. But first, Imka and Joel needed to figure out whether LLMs were driving a big increase in e-books.

3:26Sierra Juarez:They focused on Amazon, which has two-thirds of the e-book market. And they figured out the number of new e-books going on sale each month. Before the release of ChatGPT, it was about 100 ,000 books per month. And then essentially lockstep with the increase in the use of ChatGPT, we see it increasing by late or mid-2025 to 300 ,000 new books released per month. That is a tripling in the number of e-books for sale. This includes all sorts of books, including those published in the traditional ways, as long as they have an e-book manifestation. And, of course, everyone always releases an e-book.

4:00But most of these books are self-published works published through Amazon. The next step was determining how many of these books were written by AI. So Jolinimka ran a sample of around 50 ,000 titles through AI detection software. What was really interesting there is that the share of books determined to be written by AI really matched the growth rate that we saw in the new books being created almost one for one. It was really just something.

4:30Sierra Juarez:In other words, this boom in new e-books could be attributed to AI. So now this brings us to the meaty question in Joel and Imka's research. How good are these books? And the word good here can mean so many different things. Joel explained how an economist like him interprets it. What we tend to mean by good when we talk about this stuff is appealing to some people. Some people would buy it. So it's not the same as the good that a cultural critic would say. But, you know, Fifty Shades of Grey, by this definition, the economic definition, is undoubtedly a very good product because lots of people bought it.

5:05I'm going to go pick up a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and see if you gave a blurb for the back that says, like, this book is good. Economists like this book. No, economists understand that people like this book. Yes. That's, I think, the blurb we would give it. This is a valuable product.

5:21Sierra Juarez:Imka and Joel used star ratings and public Amazon sales rankings to measure whether people were buying these new AI books. And the results were clear. AI books had fewer ratings than human-written ones. The average star rating for AI books was worse, and their sales rank was lower. By all those measures, the AI books are less useful or in some sense worse than the non-AI books. In other words, they were not good. So Joel and Imka say their research suggests that human authors don't have to worry, at least for now, about being displaced by AI. Another interesting thing is there doesn't seem to be breakout hits emerging from the AI slush pile.

6:03Joel points out that, you know, Justin Bieber first got discovered on YouTube and Fifty Shades of Grey, remember a good book, had its origins as Twilight fan fiction published on the Internet. These are artists who made it through, came out of left field, as it were, and were made possible by digitization. AI doesn't seem to be like that. It's giving us more products, but they're not products all the way across the distribution. It's a whole bunch more near the middle. But having said that, everything is pretty new, so AI changes every day. And so maybe future AI will be more like regular digitization and less like big piles of middling stuff.

6:41Sierra Juarez:Even these piles of middling stuff, though, have caught the attention of people like Jeremy Tarr. He's the digital editorial director at Foders Travel. What was your last trip? My last trip was a road trip from Lake Como to the French Riviera. That sounds so glamorous. It was very glamorous. No need to rub it in Jeremy. So Foders has been publishing travel guides for more than eight decades. And travel is one of the categories where there's been an especially big increase in AI-generated e-books, according to Imka and Joel's research. Jeremy at Fodor says he's skeptical of many of the new travel guidebooks he's seen online.

7:21If you were to see just one or two of them, it'd be, you know, somebody's just entrepreneurial and they want to make a guidebook, which is, that's great. But you then look at the author, and the author has published, you know, a hundred of them just all over the world in a very short period of time. And knowing how much work and effort goes into producing a guidebook, whether it's, you know, 160 pages or 500 pages, it's impossible. Jeremy says he doesn't see AI travel books as a threat, but he does know that people are relying on ChatGPT and similar tools to plan their trips. So in July, Foders is launching a new AI product called Eugene, named after late company founder Eugene Foder.

8:08It's a chatbot trained on Foders' guidebooks and digital content, and it will give travel recommendations and help make itineraries. I think human-backed AI is the best kind of AI you can get. It's like reading an article, reading the guidebook. I mean, there is so much information on any given city, and it can take a really long time to plan something. So AI helps speed that up. It helps organize it. It's just a new way of finding the information.

8:36Sierra Juarez:Jeremy says some of the large language models out there have already scraped Fodor's material without the company's permission. Building a proprietary AI tool means the company can make money from this new technology. And it can control everything from the information it feeds Eugene to how the chatbot sounds. Eugene is friendly, but no nonsense. I think a lot of AI is fairly sycophantic, and we wanted to make an AI that is opinionated. If you say, should I go here or here, they will give you an honest assessment. I can't wait to have my travel plans totally crushed by Eugene the chatbot. That's a terrible idea.

9:21Only a dumb person would go to this museum. Okay. You say so, Eugene.

9:28Sierra Juarez:Whatever you say. This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by Kweisi Lee. It's fact-checked by Sarah Juarez. Kicking Cannon is the show's editor and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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