On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway examines the controversy surrounding AI-generated romance novels after a New York Times report revealed one author producing hundreds of titles and earning six figures. He also looks at AI’s growing presence in cultural institutions, new legal pressure from UK publishers, and data suggesting piracy remains a major threat to the book market.
Listen to the Podcast: AI Romance Authors Spark Backlash
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to Self-Publishing News. Last week was all about Bookshop.org — this week the news is a little more varied.
There has been, as you will have noticed, a huge controversy going around about AI-generated novels on Amazon. This has been doing the rounds thanks to a piece in the New York Times, which focused on Coral Hart — not the author's real name — who uses AI to write romance novels in under an hour each. Hart has written and self-published, and I use that word loosely, two hundred novels in the previous year. Those two hundred novels have racked up fifty thousand sales between them, which has given Hart a six-figure income.
That works out at roughly two hundred and fifty sales per title, which doesn't mean each novel sold particularly well individually. But it illustrates a point we already know: if you want to make an income as an author, you need lots of titles. Each title doesn't have to achieve dramatic sales — it's a question of cumulative effect. Two hundred novels at two hundred and fifty each demonstrates that.
Needless to say, this has not gone down well. In particular because Hart is open about helping others do the same thing — running courses where you can pay to learn how to do it: what prompts to use, and so on. So in the words of all advertising: you too can earn six figures a year by churning out two hundred titles.
This has not gone down well in the author community, in large part because people feel not only that this is fundamentally wrong, but that platforms should be doing more to stop it. It does show how really, really difficult it is to stay on top of such things.
But it also raises a genuinely interesting question. There are clearly readers out there reading this stuff. There is no suggestion that these are reading farms or click farms buying the titles — these are actual readers who are either working through them or stumbling across them, and there is clearly no significant drop-off in sales. Clearly something about these books means that if someone reads one, they are perfectly willing to read another.
That raises questions for the argument that there is no future in AI because it doesn't write stuff readers want — because clearly, to a certain extent, it does. So if you want to argue against people earning six figures by pumping out AI content, the argument needs to be something other than ‘readers won't accept it.'
We have been here before, of course. People talk about tsunamis, about flooding the market with rubbish. That is exactly what people said about self-published books a decade and a half ago — probably more than that now. And that settled down. What will happen with AI? Who knows. But it is clearly here to stay, and it is clearly upsetting a lot of people.
Oxford's New Fellowship for Creativity and AI
A story that I found equally interesting, because it suggests that creativity and AI is now somehow part of the establishment, comes from my home institution here in Oxford. We have just announced the establishment of the very first LAO Fellowship for Creativity and AI. It has been awarded to Refik Anadol. Those of you who have had the chance to visit the new £185 million humanities building in Oxford will have seen his immersive digital artwork in the atrium. What Anadol does is use large data sets to generate AI art.
The quotation he uses to describe his work is: ‘I hope to explore how generative AI can become a new form of cultural memory that listens to humanity's past, while imagining ethical, poetic futures.' A different and equally interesting take on AI — and one that sits at quite a distance from two hundred romance novels in a year.
The Independent Publishers Guild Issues a Legal Letter
AI has also been in the news in a way we're more familiar with — lawsuits and legal threats. In the UK, the Independent Publishers Guild has issued a letter from a legal firm demanding that tech companies explain themselves. The IPG wants to know exactly what books have been used to train AI, how they were acquired, and it wants companies to cease using publishers' copyright without express permission, and to provide detailed records of content used to date.
This is something the Society of Authors has also done. It's not entirely clear whether anything will come of it — a lot of organizations like issuing letters, and tech firms seem equally adept at ignoring them. But this feels like another step in making sure that the industry's unhappiness is formally on record.
Piracy: An Older and Simpler Threat
We end with a story that has something to do with AI — a survey in Italy found that lots of people use AI and are very satisfied with the outputs — but the really interesting findings are not about AI at all. They concern something with a much older history that has been worrying the industry for a long, long time: piracy.
This is a survey of 3,800 people, all of whom were over fifteen. It claims that piracy accounts for almost a third of the entire Italian book market. A quarter of respondents had downloaded an ebook or audiobook from a piracy site, and a total of 36% had committed some form of piracy — which might also include photocopying, for example. The figure was notably very high among university students, at 76%.
Obviously not everyone who pirated an ebook or audiobook would have bought it had piracy not been available, so it would be wrong to say each instance represents a lost sale. But clearly some of them would have purchased, and if a third of all books acquired — loosely speaking — are pirated, that is a very large portion of the market affected.
Whatever you think AI companies are or aren't doing, a much older and simpler threat to the literary industry — piracy — seems to be as much with us as it ever was. With that, I will leave you and very much look forward to speaking to you again at the same time next week, when I hope I will have some more positive and uplifting news. Thank you very much.
