One of the reasons I set my Wanee Mystery series in the 1870s was because even as new, disruptive industrial technology was being used to better life there were those who abused it. Ultimately, it tore apart the fabric of rural life. My newest Wanee Mystery, The Orleans Lady, among other things, is a story about greed. And, so, as it is launched, I struggle with the truth that “authors” are using AI to game the system for the almighty buck and wonder where it will lead us.
Amazon recently limited the number of books an individual could load to KDP to three per day. I don’t know about you, but unless I am updating covers, I don’t have three books to add in a month, well, honestly, six months. So why the limit?
Well, because persons, claiming to be “authors”, are using AI to write as many as, possibly more than, 100 books a month, most are non-fiction books, but others are fiction. Quoting James Blatch, of the Self-Publishing Formula, “Amazon understandably wants to protect the reader experience. They are up against AI-generated novels, thousands a day, and AI-driven marketing carefully balanced to produce a small profit per title. It’s a new business model that relies on quantity over quality. Twenty-five sales of a free-to-produce AI book with an AI cover and blurb, multiplied by 100 a day, is a very profitable business.”
Besides flooding the market, what does this sort of business model do to the discoverability of non-AI-produced books? You know, the sort we shed our sleep for and studiously nurture. Sure, we all write to market in our own way, but this is a different sort of beast. It is destructive to the craft and also to the reading public. Disappointed readers may become wary of buying books not published by established publishing companies, and, so, weaken independent publishing, the very thing these scammers abuse. What if romance readers quit buying romances because they couldn’t tell the wheat from the chaff until the money was spent? Or, horror of horrors, mystery readers?
These “authors” write an AI prompt using a standard structure. Say, the venerable Three-Act structure: Act 1. Setup (Exposition, Inciting incident, Plot Point 1) Act II: Confrontation (Rising Action, Midpoint, Plot point Two) Act III: Resolution (Pre-climax, Climax, denouement). Or any other plot structure that can be used repeatedly. Which is about 15 or so — some claim.
It may be a challenge at first to get the prompt just right, but each time it is used, it is refined until the output is predictable. Then:
The “author” need only change the names, the murder, maybe the town, and AI kicks back a book in the specified length, say just enough pages to result in a $2.50 royalty. It’s run through an AI grammar checker (which does actually require one to know some grammar). Slammed into some nifty formatting software, downloaded, and loaded to KDP, where 25 people read it and discover it is poorly written, has a stale plot, and the characters seem rote. If only three of these fine books are loaded a day, the “author” earns $5,625 ($2.50x25buyersx3booksx30days) plus a month, with no costs beyond software subscriptions and, maybe, a few courses from other scammers.
I call that theft. It’s cheating your “fellow” authors and stealing from readers, whether non-fiction or fiction. Mind you, I might see some advantage to developing an AI prompt to create a synopsis from which you write a book, actually write a book (as in type in your own words), especially if you hate creating synopses and/or if you normally rely on a synopsis while writing. I might even be persuaded that taking a raw work generated by ChatGPT or Claude and refining it into a quality product could be legitimate. Maybe? But new technology always serves two gods: the one who envisions the good of it and the one who manipulates it for personal gain (usually at the expense of others).
I’m old school, I started writing books, bad, bad, bad historical love stories, when I was eight. I’m talking tales seriously reflective of the last thing read or watched on TV. Yes, I followed the plot structures from those sources. Heck, that’s where I learned the basics of plotting. But I never cheated. Every, every word came from my head and flowed through my fingers first in pencil, then pen, then typewriter and finally computer.
Now here comes AI. God save independent writers and publishers from the seemingly endless opportunities AI offers hucksters, including the fake publishers, course pushers, and marketers (agents) using AI-generated emails to lure you into their traps. I swear I get twenty a day.
I’m a guarded optimist and pray this all burns itself out. But it makes me crazy. Especially when I’m looking at the venerable blank page, searching for my next word. Sigh!
Find me at https://dzchurch.com, where you can discover more about my books and sign up for my newsletter. To order The Orleans Lady, follow this link: https://www.amazon.com/Orleans-Lady-Wanee-Mystery-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0GGY11CM5/.
Ladies of Mystery 