Amazon.com is requiring writers who want to sell books through its e-book program to tell the company in advance that their work includes artificial intelligence material.

After months of complaints from the Authors Guild and other groups, Amazon.com has started requiring writers who want to sell books through its e-book program to tell the company in advance that their work includes artificial intelligence material.

The Authors Guild praised the new regulations, which were posted Wednesday, as a “welcome first step” toward deterring the proliferation of computer-generated books on the online retailer’s site. Many writers feared computer-generated books could crowd out traditional works and would be unfair to consumers who didn’t know they were buying AI content.

In a statement posted on its website, the Guild expressed gratitude toward “the Amazon team for taking our concerns into account and enacting this important step toward ensuring transparency and accountability for AI-generated content.”

    • Chozo@kbin.social
      105·
      1 year ago

      You joke, but you bring up an excellent point as to why I dislike the “AI is plagiary” argument that I see a lot of these days.

      Everything is plagiarized in some way. No thought is truly original. Unless you spend your whole life with zero contact to anyone or anything and consume zero media of any form (in which case, have fun conveying your original thoughts with the language you’ve had to invent for yourself that nobody else could possibly translate), then every idea is based on another idea before it. Every single thought has an inspiration behind it. LLMs aren’t just copy/pasting content; the actual logic behind generative content production is incredibly similar to how people form thoughts and ideas of their own.

      That said, if you’re writing a book using AI, I’d argue a case for laziness more than plagiary. Though I don’t see an inherent problem in using AI to help write a story. But if the whole book is AI-generated, I can’t imagine it will be good enough to sell enough to justify the time and effort it takes to produce that amount of text and have it published, so I wouldn’t foresee it being a very widespread problem just yet.