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 
I don’t trust AI. I try to use the few things I find helpful, but for the most part like any machine, they have no soul nor sense of right and wrong. Also, I am so tired of receiving those stupid emails from AI-generated people with almost names and almost emails. I am also in that class action suit, Bortz vs Anthropic, because they stole seven of my books, as they did from thousands of other writers, and the thieves are making a fortune from selling the words and phrases to poor souls who cannot write. But all of that stated, if we stay on our guard and not become complacent, maybe we can take the best from AI. Now I will go back to my WIP, being written the old-fashioned way. By me. A thought-provoking post.
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AI can be dangerous. I know of at east four titles Amazon had to take down that were supposedly written by expert mushroom identifiers that were AI creations that could have killed someone.
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There are good things about AI and, in my estimation, mostly bad things. I do put the blurbs I write into ChatGPT and ask it to tweak them to whatever genre I ask for. Then I pick through and use the punchier/theme-specific words they used in place of my weaker ones. I’ve found that to be helpful. But otherwise, I like to come up with my own plots, characters, and the direction of my books. It’s what makes them my books. Thought provoking post!
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Thank you for laying this out so clearly. What disturbs me is the number of writers (mostly not well published) who are trying to carve out “corners” of AI to justify using it without understanding how it is eroding their ability to produce a book without it in the long run. Any challenge to their push for using AI for “assistance” is met with “mild” corrections, but if you cannot rely on your own ability to write a correct, decent sentence, are you really going to be able to rise to the challenge of creative work? AI erodes the standards of craft, of thinking and discernment, but writers are thrilled to have some parts of the writing process made easier for them without any sense of the cost. F. Scott Fitzgerald sometimes couldn’t spell, or wrote so fast that he was careless, but he could think and understand and develop his own creativity. One of the best exercises is to read the first book by an author and then a fourth or fifth book–we can see how the writer grew and developed. AI will end this growth, and the writer will not see that now their thinking is directed and manipulated by the software. That’s not the work of a creative writer. Great post.
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