Kindle novelists are using ChatGPT

If the book is poorly written and it's obvious, then it's probably not going to gather much of a following but it's not going to hurt anyone. The next two years of book spam are going to be grammatically impeccable and require so little effort that a few people are going to make large amounts of money, at the expense of legitimate self-publishers who'll have an even harder time getting noticed at all, selling fake books on Amazon until the hammer comes down.

After that, traditional publishing becomes the target. By 2025, Amazon will have the fake book problem largely solved--it'll still be possible to get fake books through, but at some point it'll be harder than to just write a real one--while New York publishers are running the third-party software the MBAs bought because it was cheap. Meanwhile, even though the AI-written books won't be good in the sense of James Joyce, they'll be good enough to best-sell. And, of course, there will be prestige associated with being the first one to pull it off. If you make a living selling fake books on Amazon, you don't admit to it. If you get the New York Times to review your book, and if you get a few celebrities to include it in their book clubs, and then reveal (with proof) that it was written by AI, you become a hero among the 90 percent of the US who hate the New York Times (and, to a lesser extent, traditional publishing) because their kids will never get hired by places like that. Selling fake books on Amazon is shameful; selling a fake book to a publisher for a seven-figure advance, and all the big ticket reviews and celebrity endorsements included in the package, is hilarious. Of course, 99.99% of attempts at this are going to fail somewhere in the process--the hardest part is going to be creating fake identities [1] so you can query the same agents hundreds of times--but there are going to be way more than 10000 tries.

It actually wouldn't surprise me if someone writes a real book, gets it into traditional publishing, makes the bestseller list, and then tries to go back and say that it was written by AI, just to become a national hero (as opposed to just another guy who was an NYT bestseller for a few weeks). Which is why I hope the first person to actually pull it off does a good enough job of documenting his process that he can prove that it really was a GPT novel... so he can't be accused of this.

----

[1] Gray hat uses of LLMs, such as creating fake personal identities for social proof and credibility purposes, may be more widespread than the black hat purposes we're all scared of. It's now really easy (seconds vs. hours) to get the 3- or 4-digit karma count necessary to not look like a sock puppet. In the past, the gray hats brought Reddit and HN accounts; in the late 2020s, you'll be able to buy whole "people", with deepfaked audio, video, and text presence all over social media, for $100 a pop.