Study: AI-generated books flood Amazon self-publishing and crowd out human authors' sales
TuhinChakr · x · 2026-10-13
A new AI-and-copyright study, using full-text AI detection from Pangram, analyzed self-published genre fiction on Amazon from 2023 to March 2026.
Key findings:
- Amazon is flooded with books containing substantial AI-generated text.
- These AI books are earning significant revenue.
- Most importantly, they are crowding out sales of non-AI books.
The authors (UMich, Stony Brook, and Jane Ginsburg of Columbia Law) note a book doesn't need to be high quality to have market impact — it just has to exist in the thousands, which generative AI enables.
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