How ChatGPT is taking over the self-publishing industry with over 200 AI-written books on Amazon

Several would-be authors are reportedly using ChatGPT to write and publish fiction and how-to guides on Amazon. Reuters reported a Saleman from New York, “created a 30-page illustrated children’s e-book in a matter of hours” and has so far made $100 from the book’s sale. 

Schickler used text prompts to have ChatGPT generate story blocks, and he used OpenAI’s Dalle2 (an AI-powered text-to-image generator) to produce caricatures and illustrations for his children’s story book.

The New-York based salesman, after few hours on the software, published his book, which he titled ‘The Wise Little Squirrel: A Tale of Saving and Investing‘ in the Amazon Kindle store now selling for $9.99 (paperback) and $2.99 (e-book). 

Amazon’s Kindle store now has over 200 e-books with ChatGPT listed as an author or co-author, such as “How to Write and Generate Content Using ChatGPT,” “The Power of Homework,” and the poetry collection “Echoes of the Cosmos.” This number continues to rise daily. The self-publishing platform is flooded with books written entirely by ChatGPT which constitute a new subgenre.

Experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of e-books may have been written by the AI bot, but it is difficult to get an exact count due to the nature of ChatGPT and the unwillingness of many writers to reveal their use of it.

“I could see people making a whole career out of this,” said Schickler, who used prompts on ChatGPT like “write a story about a dad teaching his son about financial literacy”.

Since its debut in November, ChatGPT’s uncanny ability to create coherent blocks of text instantly has sent shock waves through Silicon Valley and beyond. Schickler seems to be at the forefront of a movement testing the promise and limitations of ChatGPT.

Some of the biggest names in tech have been rattled by the arrival of this software, leading Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to launch new AI-based features for Google and Bing, respectively.

A recent report claim there are hundreds of how-to guides on YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit that explain in detail how to write a book in a matter of hours. Some of the things that are talked about are get-rich-quick schemes, nutrition tips, software development instructions, and recipes.

One author, who goes by the pen name Frank White on YouTube, showed how he wrote a 119-page novella in one day. The e-book costs only $1 at the Kindle Store on Amazon. White suggests in the video that anyone with the resources and time could use AI to crank out 300 such books annually.

As ChatGPT learns to write by analysing millions of pages of text, its use has raised concerns about its factual accuracy. We reported CNET’s artificial intelligence (AI) experiment led to numerous rewrites and accusations of plagiarism, so the technology news site eventually stopped using AI altogether.