Artificial intelligence is transforming the publishing industry. What does that mean for human authors?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s almost impossible to gauge how many authors are using tools like ChatGPT. But it appears that generative AI, which can churn out a novel-length work with a few simple prompts, is driving a boom in book publishing. More than 4 million books were released in the U.S. in 2025, up a whopping 33% from the previous year. That jump was largely due to a spike in new self-published works, which rocketed 39% year on year to 3.5 million. While it is easier than ever to self-publish, research suggests many of those books were not written by humans. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that about half the books published in 2025 and sold on Amazon contained AI-generated text, up from 23% in 2023. (ChatGPT was released in late 2022.) AI writing is most common in popular genres such as romance fiction, which tends toward formulaic plots, and in nonfiction, where major news events can trigger a flood of AI books within hours. Online influencers \u201chave been spreading the word for some time: Use AI to write a book. If it sells, it\u2019s free money,\u201d said tech journalist Kashmir Hill, who recently discovered an AI-generated, error-riddled biography of herself on Amazon. The \u201cauthor\u201d of Hill\u2019s biography published nine other books the same week. But AI writing is not just confined to the self-publishing world: In recent months, at least two major publishing houses have withdrawn books over suspicions of AI use.<\/p>\n
Most recently, the hotly anticipated debut novel from Nigerian-born Jerry Falade. Fourteen publishers bid for the U.S. rights to Call Me, I\u2019ll Hide the Body; Falade, a grad student at Southern Methodist University, signed with a Macmillan imprint for more than $2 million. But the deal collapsed last month after Falade\u2019s agents told the publisher they could no longer support the \u201cstunningly good\u201d crime novel because of AI concerns. Falade says he used AI only for research \u201cand not for writing the book itself\u201d and argues the deal\u2019s cancellation was racially motivated. A few months earlier, Hachette nixed the U.S. release of Mia Ballard\u2019s horror novel Shy Girl over suspicions it was largely AI-generated. After the book was published in the U.K., readers pointed to linguistic tells of AI, including word repetition (\u201csharp\u201d or \u201csharply\u201d appears 159 times in 247 pages); the grouping of adjectives, phrases, and ideas into threes; and the frequency of \u201csomething x, something y\u201d sentence construction, such as, \u201cIn his hands is a cake, gleaming, its pink frosting too smooth, like plastic dipped in sugar, like something that belongs on a screen.\u201d Ballard claims that an acquaintance who edited the book used AI, not her. \u201cEveryone liked\u201d the book, one publishing exec told the Financial Times. \u201cAfter Shy Girl, every editor is nervous.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most publishers require writers to affirm that their work is \u201coriginal,\u201d which is increasingly being interpreted as a ban on AI-created text and images. That\u2019s a sensible safeguard because AI-generated works are not protected by copyright, the foundation of the $140 billion global publishing industry. But publishing houses are loath to entirely bar authors from using AI, because there are other ways it can usefully be deployed, such as to check grammar and conduct research\u2014although there are risks in handing that latter job to a chatbot.<\/p>\n
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Media entrepreneur Steven Rosenbaum used AI tools to research and organize The Future of Truth, a nonfiction book about how AI reshapes reality. In May, The New York Times revealed the book contained numerous fabricated and misattributed quotations dreamed up by AI. Rosenbaum said that if the episode \u201cserves as a warning about the risks of AI-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.\u201d To avoid such embarrassments, a growing number of publishers are turning to AI detectors: software that promises to scan a text and accurately reveal how much of it was likely AI-generated.<\/p>\n
That depends on whom you ask. One popular detector, GPTZero, claims to be 99% accurate. Pangram, another favored detector, claims a false positive rate of only 1 in 10,000. But critics argue that AI detectors are deeply flawed. After his sci-fi manuscript was rejected by numerous publishers, Antonio Bricio, an engineering consultant and aspiring author, ran the text through the AI detector Originality.ai. The program was 100% certain he\u2019d used AI, but when he deleted just a few sentences, it declared the manuscript to be 100% human. \u201cWhat if publishers or agents start running these AI tools on everybody?\u201d asks Bricio. Thriller writer Andrea Bartz\u2014 a lead plaintiff in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic that secured a $1.5 billion settlement for authors over the firm\u2019s use of pirated books to train its models\u2014was enraged when a detector labeled her writing as 82% AI-generated. \u201cI guess that\u2019s what happens when your books were stolen to program AI,\u201d said fellow novelist Rene Denfeld, whose own work was also flagged as AI.<\/p>\n
Most want books \u201cto come from the author\u2019s brain and heart and not a computer that\u2019s robbed the writer\u2019s brain,\u201d said author Laura Taylor Namey. And that argument is supported by the fact that book charts are still dominated by human authors. But the flood of AI works is making it harder for flesh-and-blood writers like Jess Michaels to grab attention and make a living in an increasingly crowded market. A historical romance author, Michaels has released 117 novels since 1999\u2014 most of them self-published\u2014and has notched 10 USA Today best sellers. But she has recently seen sales drop so drastically, and the number of AI-powered imitators rise so rapidly, that she\u2019s considering giving up publishing. \u201cYou\u2019re talking about directly pirating my work, putting it into an engine so that you can produce a \u2018Jess Michaels\u2013type book,\u2019 and then glutting the market with it,\u201d she said. \u201cI cannot tell you how soul-crushing it is.\u201d<\/p>\n