It's a crisis in literature. How do we fix this?
Maybe someone whose only method of selecting books is to scroll through Kindle and look at the titles, maybe they need to pay attention to publication dates. But the rest of the world picks books because they get a recommendation, they look at reviews, they know the author, etc.
NYTimes said that the new Marlon James book might be the book of the century so far. Hyperbole, I'm sure, but it's now on my reading list and I'm pretty sure it wasn't written by AI.
Newness is not really a valuable quality when it comes to books, barring some exceptions like books on subjects that change frequently and meaningfully.
Diminished quality however is a meaningful signal, and would give most serious readers pause.
As best I can tell, the problem is contained to kindle self publishing and the like, which were always unfiltered. And we buy plenty of new books.
At his point I think that one has to assume that almost every author is using AI to some extent. And even if they don't, their editors will apply changes, no doubt using ChatGPT and other tools.
I cannot imagine this is an actual trend that's preventing people from reading, so please bring a couple citations.
Reading has been on the decline for more than a decade, far beyond when AI was invented. I'll go with the 2008 Steve Jobs quote:
> In January 2008, Steve Jobs famously claimed that "people don’t read anymore," specifically asserting that 40 percent of Americans read one book or less the previous year.