Wherever books are discussed, the past few weeks have seen heated discussion of a graph that appeared in the Economist. It puts flesh on the bones of that “million more books” claim that did the rounds a little earlier. What it shows is the correlation between the steepening of the “books published” figures and the release of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022. In classic hockey-stick style, it shows AI-generated books sharply increasing to the point where they are equaling the number of non-AI-generated titles at around 150,000 a month.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
There is a lot of discussion about this graph, not least about the fact that the researchers made their claims about AI-generated titles based on the use of Pangram detection software. This of course is eyebrow-worthy in itself after the Commonwealth Short Story Prize debacle. For the most detailed and informative discussion on this graph, I recommend reading Mark Williams.
Five Graphs, One Picture
The graph itself is just one of five published in the same Economist article, and they are most informative in terms of trends when taken as a group. Fortunately, through the University of Oxford, I have an institutional account that gets me behind the Economist's paywall, so I can paint that wider picture.
The other four categories examined are legal suits (self-filed suits doubled to 40,000 between 2023 and 2025 with no lessening of success rates); research papers (which have always risen quickly—I could say things here about academic publishing—but where evidence of AI language is seen in 57 percent of papers in 2025, up from 12 percent in 2023); coding (with the number of new apps in the app store doubling to 100,000 a month in under a year).
What Music Tells Us
And then there is the other category of real interest to us as creatives: music. The graph here comes from use on Deezer, and the suggestion is that around 75,000 AI-generated songs are uploaded daily, an astronomical rate of progression from the 10,000 at the start of 2025. But the most interesting thing of all is that when it comes to music, researchers found 97 percent of listeners couldn't discern the AI-generated content.
And it's that figure that will stay with me when we hear comments like those from James Daunt that Barnes and Noble will stock AI-generated titles if readers demand them.
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