Study says AI-written self-published books are flooding Amazon and cannibalizing sales
TuhinChakr · x · 2026-07-29
A new paper finds AI-written self-published books are crowding out non-AI titles on Amazon
The quoted paper studies self-published genre fiction on Amazon from 2023 to March 2026 using full-text AI detection from Pangram.
Its main finding is that Amazon is being flooded with books containing substantial AI-generated text, and these books are not just earning money—they are also crowding out sales of non-AI books.
The authors argue that a book does not need to be high quality to affect the market at scale. It only needs to exist in the thousands, which generative AI now makes possible.
The thread frames this as an early result tied to a legal theory around AI and copyright and notes that the work is co-authored with researchers from UMich, Stony Brook, and Columbia.
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