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Comment by MasterScrat | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see how this market ("mostly" AI-written books) won’t get arbitraged to death with the cheaper and open-weight models that keep coming out

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The problem is not about money it is that we are made massively culturally poorer by the flood of ahistorical, amoral, incoherent, rococco, contradictory yet plausible shit produced by LLMs.

Both the internet and books have been flooded with ‘content’ which appears like human content but has no coherence or intention to it and tends to fall apart completely the longer form the story.

Even our autocomplete is being infected with LLM suggestions, distorting and guiding how people write.

This is a VERY significant problem for our culture long term.

I don’t see any other way past this other than regulation:

We need authenticated online spaces where your account is linked to a real, government issued ID. This way, moderating content becomes feasible again. Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time. I predict people will gravitate towards authenticated markets (and social media).

I for one am sick and tired of second guessing every text I‘m reading, at least give me someone to hold accountable.

Sounds like everything is proceeding according to plan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY

Well that doesn't require a regulation. You can just create this space.

A space "regulated" by id. its obvious and its going to happen

When people talk about regulation it's usually government regulation.

> Bans will hold value, since you can’t just create new accounts all the time.

People will just flood to places that are not official and where they'll be able to express their views freely. That's how these things have always turned out to be.

In other words, let's say that I'll get banned from the likes of FB or IG as a result of me trespassing my government's ideological wishes, well, tough luck for FB and IG (and fuck them while I'm at it), I'll just make an account on a platform that won't abide by EU/Romanian (I'm Romanian myself) propaganda, where I'll still be able to share views with people thinking similar thoughts to what I think.

That’s fair, and I don’t mind this. All I‘m proposing is the option for platforms to use this method on their own.

If FB or IG don’t want to use it, fair. I‘m hopeful that there’s gonna be competition if there’s a system with little friction.

Or maybe we just collectively impose severe social sanction on people trying to pass off low effort slop as their own work and stop calling it ‘artificial intelligence’?

This is impossible, or it’s going to be soon. LinkedIn just introduced a „this is AI-slop“-button and it remains to be seen if it’s used for good, or used to train better AI-slop.

It’s a losing battle in my view.

There was a case a while back now of an AI generated mushroom identification book filled with inaccuracies.

Problem is short of filtering out anything published after 2023 it’s almost impossible to find something that isn’t slop now.

> Problem is short of filtering out anything published after 2023

Is it even feasible to filter this? Such metadata can be easily faked too in a lot of contexts.

You don’t use metadata. You use old book reviews and historical top charts.

We can basically only read well known books from the past.

Id argue the true source of poor culture is this globalized bland/blended talking points and memes that propagate 24/7/365 over multimedia comunication. Boring "hipster" cafes found in burkina faso and new york is just one manifestation of this.

the market they analyse is specifically self-published fiction. Most of the traditionally published books are not AI generated and they make significantly more money as a category than self publishing does. It is not really possible to flood that market in this form with 0 entry barriers.

So yes, allowing AI slop in a market where anyone can publish anything and quality is not a very strict criteria, of course it will dillute the market. But we are unlikely to see this shift in traditional publishing houses.

$2m crime novel deal collapses amid questions over AI use

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/31/crime-novel-de...

So a book that was “stunningly good, everyone fell in love with it. It’s a book that appeals to absolutely everyone.” now won't be published because AI was used to create it?

Personally I prefer stunningly good over exclusively human created.

I'd want to read it before passing judgement on the quality of it, not trust the word of the author's agent, one Marc Gerald of 'Europa Content', who you are quoting here. It appears a lot of people in the chain up to the editor failed at their job here, probably because they are submerged in slop submitted using LLMs and maybe the first chapter was good and had work put into it.

Clearly the editor didn't think it was stunningly good, or they wouldn't have flagged it up.

Exactly my point. Self publishing does not have these entry problems or that level of money. This is the opposite of flooding the market with generative AI

GAI is also being used by prospective authors applying to publishing houses, and they are in fact flooded with dross created with it, which is a serious problem for them.

To the extent that their reviewers get lazy and are not reading entire texts, as evidenced by this slipping through and then being caught by an editor (who did read the whole thing).

So no, this does not prove your point.

It got rejected and that's the proof that these things get accepted by the system? Sure, AI can flood publishing houses with submissions but they have dedicated people and proper vetting process before they publish. That protects slop from getting published. No such safeguards exists in self publishing which is why its easier to see effects of slop there since nothing can stop you from publishing your AI work in that market.

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