Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
AuthorsTuhin Chakrabarty, Xinyue Liu, Jane C. Ginsburg, Paramveer Dhillon
Resources
AI-generated books may be lower quality, but their sheer volume is reshaping Amazon’s market and squeezing revenue from human-authored books.
Key results
Share of titles with more than 25% detected AI text.
Launch-window unit-sales share held by substantial-AI books.
Fold increase in books with observed quarterly sales relative to the 2023 Q1 baseline.
Fold increase in quarterly revenue relative to the 2023 Q1 baseline.
Decrease in launch-window revenue per selling title for no-detected-AI books from 2023 to 2025.
What the paper found
This study examines whether undisclosed AI-written fiction merely adds low-quality “slop” or dilutes a live creative market. The researchers analyzed 14,419 self-published genre-fiction e-books sold through Amazon, combining full-text AI detection with proprietary daily sales, revenue, price, and rank records through June 2026. Using Pangram 3.3, they classified books as having no, light, or substantial AI text, with substantial content defined as more than 25% of detected text. Substantial-AI books represented 20.0% of titles but only 12.1% of sales and 11.3% of revenue, while increasingly entering Amazon’s top ranks. The central market effect was scale: books with observed quarterly sales increased 19.2-fold, but quarterly revenue grew only 8.9-fold, and revenue per selling title declined. This contraction also affected books with no detected AI text, whose launch-window revenue per selling title fell 17.3% from 2023 to 2025, especially in genres with high AI exposure and Kindle Unlimited availability. Among successful books, substantial-AI titles contained rare five-or-more-word expressions found in existing books at a rate of 45.0%, compared with 37.7% for comparable no-AI titles; overlap also rose with revenue only for AI-heavy books. The authors describe these observational results as market dilution through volume rather than quality, with implications for the market-effect argument in copyright litigation such as Kadrey v. Meta, while noting that textual overlap does not establish copying from a particular book.
Original abstract
Generative AI can produce book-length works of fiction at near-zero cost. These books are often dismissed as low-quality ``slop'' that buyers will ignore, and are assumed to carry little commercial weight. We test that assumption with full-text AI detection across 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books sold on Amazon from 2023 to 2026, matched to daily sales records through June 2026. None of these books disclose whether or not they contain AI-produced content. We find that books for which we detected substantial AI text ($>$ 25\%) make up a large share of the catalog but a smaller share of sales. Even so, they reach commercial scale, winning a growing share of sales over time and taking more of the scarce top-rank positions once held by books with no detected AI text. Over this period, the number of books with observed sales in a quarter grew 19.2-fold, while quarterly revenue grew only 8.9-fold. The market therefore added selling books faster than it added revenue, and revenue per selling book fell across most genres. Books with no AI text lose the most ground in genres with high AI diffusion, and most of all where Kindle Unlimited availability is high. Among top-selling books, those with substantial AI text draw on more distinctive language from existing books than do books with no AI text; for these books overlap rises with revenue, a gradient we do not detect for books with no AI text. Generative AI can thus reshape a creative market through scale rather than quality. Our results bear directly on the market-effect question at the center of the fair use defense to copyright infringement.
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