ButtUgly: Main_blogentry_090823

Content explosion continueth

Jane Friedman talks about how AI is messing up with her work, since anyone can write and publish books under her name for a quick buck.

With the flood of AI content now published at Amazon, sometimes attributed to authors in a misleading or fraudulent manner, how can anyone reasonably expect working authors to spend every week for the rest of their lives policing this? And if authors don’t police it, they will certainly hear about it, from readers concerned about these garbage books, and from readers who credulously bought this crap and have complaints. Or authors might not hear any thing at all, and lose a potential reader forever.

We desperately need guardrails on this landslide of misattribution and misinformation. Amazon and Goodreads, I beg you to create a way to verify authorship, or for authors to easily block fraudulent books credited to them. Do it now, do it quickly.

In the old cyberpunk dystopias, the scary stuff was always in corporate vaults, and a big fear was that a smart AI would escape the corporate computers and roam wildly on the internet. I don't recall an author who thought the dystopia would be a small company trying to turn in a quick buck by making their AI available for everyone. But here we are, and we're not at all prepared for this.