What once seemed like an impossible task, can now be achieved in a matter of minutes. People who have dreamed about having their books published one day are taken to ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, to get it done.
Brett Schickler, a salesman in Rochester, New York, created a 30-page illustrated children’s eBook, Sammy the Squirrel, in a matter of hours. The book went up for sale in January through Amazon.com Inc.’s self-publishing unit. Schickler also has The Wise Little Squirrel: A Tale of Saving and Investing available in the Amazon Kindle store for $2.99 and $9.99 for a printed version. The salesman said ChatGPT has inspired him to compose more books. “I could see people making a whole career out of this.”
ChatGPT has come at a time when companies are laying off employees because they can no longer afford to keep them on the payroll. While the chatbot has given technology firms a new purpose, things look gloomy for the common man who is trying to run their family and put bread on the table.
ChatGPT seems to be ready to upend the book industry as would-be novelists and self-help gurus looking to make a quick buck, are turning to the software to help create bot-made eBooks and publish them through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing arm.
Something to Worry About ChatGPT Books
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As tutorials about making a book via ChatGPT in just a few hours flood YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok, first-time authors are taking to illustrated children’s books. Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the writers’ group the Authors Guild, believes this is something to worry about.
“These books will flood the market and a lot of authors are going to be out of work. Ghostwriting by humans has a long tradition, but the ability to automate through AI could turn booking writing from a craft into a commodity.”
Rasenberger says there needs to be transparency from authors and the platforms about how these books are created or one will end up with a lot of low-quality books.
But wannabe writers feel otherwise, and online retailers or eCommerce platforms like Amazon have no such policies whereby the writer has to disclose that they took help from AI. Frank White, one such author who created a 119-page novella, Galactic Pimp: Vol. 1, said anyone with the wherewithal and time could create 300 such books a year, all using AI.
Story books aside, there are growing fears that ChatGPT and its like can be used to create research papers. This could become a mess on a whole new level for scientists.
