The rise of AI-written fiction book sales on Amazon, 2023-2026

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Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

🚨 New paper on AI and Copyright 🚨

It's easy to dismiss AI-written books 📚 as slop nobody buys. So, armed with full-text AI detection from @pangram, we studied self-published genre fiction books sold on Amazon from 2023 to 2026 March

Turns out Amazon is flooded with books with substantial AI text and these books are earning significant 💰💸 and most importantly, crowding out sales of non-AI books.

FWIW, a book doesn't need to be high quality to have a market impact. It just has to exist in the thousands, which Generative AI enables.

Joint w/ @dhillon_p (@UMich), @irisiris_l (@stonybrooku ) & Jane Ginsburg (@ColumbiaLaw)

(1/n) 🧵

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3:20 PM · Jul 28, 202652.3KViews

Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

12h

How we did it 📊: We randomly sampled 14,419 self-published genre fiction ebooks (less gatekeeping and low barrier to entry) and ran Pangram on the full-text to classify each book as substantial AI (>25%), light AI (<25%) and no-AI(0%).

Then we matched each book to a

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Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

12h

Books with substantial AI text are now everywhere: 1 in 5 books in our sample, across every genre - romance, thrillers, sci-fi, all of it. The typical book written with AI sells far fewer copies than the typical non-AI one. But there are so many of them that as a group they've

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Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

12h

Here's the imbalance at the heart of the paper. Over 3 years, the books catalog grew 38x cumulatively. The book's revenue? Only 9x quarterly. Way more books fighting over a pie that barely grew which means the average book earns less than it used to. (4/n)

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Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

12h

"Sure, but doesn’t it mean that cheap AI books are dragging the average down?" No, and this is our key result.

No-AI books, on their own, earn less per book than they did in 2023 in 7 of 8 genres. The one genre where human authors are doing better (+35%) is Fantasy/horror which

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Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

12h

The more AI books enter a genre, the more ground non-AI books lose. Their hold on the top-chart spots slides from ~88% in the least-AI genres to ~63% in the most. And it's the worst in Kindle Unlimited-heavy genres since KU readers draw from one shared subscription pool, so every

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Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

12h

The million dollar question : Who's producing these books? Authors who, once they started producing with AI, didn't stop but instead accelerated.

Among those who kept at it, 3 in 4 published faster than before, some hitting dozens of books a year.

The monetary earnings are

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Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

12h

And the AI books that succeed share a signature. They contain noticeably more rare phrases that already appear in published books than successful non-AI books do.Award-winning literary fiction, for comparison, reuses rare phrasing at less than half their rate. (8/n)

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Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

12h

What’s funny is that AI is causing mode collapse :) A lot of AI-written books have verbatim overlap from other AI books. Can this serve as an alternative evidence to AI-detection skeptics ? (9/n)

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Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

12h

👨‍⚖️ TL;DR: AI doesn't need to write high-quality books for non-AI book writers to get hurt. Cheap books at massive volume are enough and they've cut what the average human-written book earns in most genres and pushed human titles down the bestseller ranks. (10/n)

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Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

12h

Our results also speak directly to a copyright question that is being litigated right now: whether AI outputs compete with the very works the models are trained on.

In Kadrey v. @Meta , Judge VinceChhabria spoke about market dilution and flagged this as the harm that could be

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Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

12h

Our paper can be found at the link below : arxiv.org/pdf/2607.20349

Anonymized data and code coming soon. Stay Tuned. Many many thanks to friends at @pangram @max_spero_ @kthai1618 @bradley_emi @jennajrussell for their encouragement and support with this research 💕

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Tuhin Chakrabarty

@TuhinChakr

11h

@bcmerchant @TheLincoln maybe of interest to you

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Pangram

@pangram

12h

Awesome!

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