Jess Michaels, a historical romance writer, has released 117 novels since she started writing full time in 1999, most of them self-published. She’s built a devoted readership, and has had 10 USA Today best sellers.
But lately, sales have been so dismal that she might stop publishing.
“The glut of the A.I. work makes discoverability very difficult,” Michaels said. “You’re talking about directly pirating my work, putting it into an engine so that you can produce a ‘Jess Michaels-type book,’ and then glutting the market with it.
“I cannot tell you how soul-crushing it is,” she added. “It essentially erases actual authors.”
It didn’t take long for chatbot writing to spill into books after artificial intelligence models capable of spitting out sophisticated prose arrived several years ago. But many in the book world held out hope that fiction would be the last fortress to fall — that readers wanted stories full of human emotions and could tell when they weren’t written by humans.
A few years into the A.I. era, there is sobering evidence that a significant and growing portion of the novels being sold are written with or by chatbots, and that readers are buying them.
A new study conducted by computer scientists using A.I. detection software to analyze thousands of self-published novels on Amazon, found that a substantial number of those novels contained chatbot-generated prose.
“In genre fiction, people are using A.I. to write these books, and readers are not able to tell,” said Tuhin Chakrabarty, a professor of computer science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who led the research.
After setting aside books that weren’t selling, the team looked at a random sample of 14,419 self-published novels released on Amazon between January 2023 and March 2026 using A.I. detection software from Pangram, which many computer scientists consider to be one of the most reliable programs of its kind. The study found that in 2,168 of those books, more than 50 percent of the prose was A.I. generated, and that 970 of the novels were more than 90 percent A.I.-generated.
The researchers estimate that the sales of all novels in their sample including at least 25 percent A.I.-generated text totaled in the tens of millions of dollars in the last three years. The findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, seem to confirm what many in the book business feared: A.I. writing is now an inescapable fixture of the retail landscape.
Amazon doesn’t prohibit the sale of A.I.-generated books on its site. The company asks self-published authors to disclose to Amazon whether or not they used A.I. to create their books, and limits the number of books each author can upload to the site to 10 per week.
But writers are not required to flag their A.I. use for readers. And the 10-book limit still allows for the sale of A.I.-assisted works at a scale and speed that would be practically impossible for even a prolific human to match.
A spokesman for Amazon, Josh Pflug, said the company has clear content guidelines regarding the sale of books on its site.
“We take proactive and reactive measures to prevent, detect, and remove content that violates those guidelines, whether A.I.-generated or not,” he said.
Other researchers have also found an alarming number of books containing A.I. writing on Amazon. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that came out earlier this year found a correlation between the spike in the number of books that contain A.I.-generated prose and the rapidly growing number of e-books on the site — a finding that Amazon disputes.
“The claims about title growth in our store are not consistent with what we are seeing,” Pflug said, although he declined to provide internal figures.
The researchers used Pangram to analyze text from around 60,000 books sold on Amazon. From that sample, about 53 percent of the books published in 2025 contained A.I.-generated text, compared to 23 percent in 2023.
The study found A.I. use to be higher in nonfiction categories like travel and outdoor sports, and comparably low in fiction. It also showed that the average rating of new books on Amazon has dropped as A.I. use has spread.
“If all of these new books are much worse than what we already have, then there’s little to be gained by consumers,” said Imke Reimers, an associate professor of strategy and business economics at Cornell University, who coauthored the study.
Both studies could add fuel to copyright cases that authors and publishers have brought against A.I. companies. In a barrage of lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI and Meta, publishers and writers have argued that the surge in A.I.-generated works has flooded the market, diluting some of their sales.
Over the past several months, a string of A.I.-related scandals has unsettled the literary world. And the explosion of A.I. writing has put distributors and retailers in an awkward spot. Amazon’s stance toward selling A.I.-generated titles has generally been lenient, but other retailers have tried to take a more nuanced approach toward stocking them.
In May, James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, caused an uproar in the book world when he said in an interview on the “Today” show that he has “no problem” selling A.I.-generated books if they are labeled. His remarks were widely condemned on social media by readers and writers, who said he was opening the door to selling slop at a major bookstore chain.
Daunt later clarified his remarks in a statement he shared with The New York Times, noting that Barnes & Noble takes “active measures to exclude all A.I.-generated books from our online catalog and never knowingly order any for stocking in our stores.”
He added that while “the store will sell A.I.-generated books if there is clear demand, we think it very unlikely that there will be customer demand for A.I.-generated books.”
There are at least some A.I. novels for sale on Barnes & Noble’s website, including “Fighting Love’s Flame,” a steamy romance about an Alaskan smokejumper and a documentary filmmaker who falls for him, and “Tumbleweeds & Tequila,” about a woman who is stranded in the desert and rescued by a hot ex-Navy Seal. Both books were published by Future Fiction Press, a new publishing company that produces novels using A.I. The books’ overviews on the Barnes & Noble website disclose that they were “produced using author‑directed A.I. tools.”
Other booksellers are drawing a harder line against A.I. generated works.
“Are you going to allow scammers to rip off your customers? The answer has to be no,” said Andy Hunter, the founder of Bookshop, an online book-selling platform that bills itself as an independent business alternative to Amazon.
Hunter said Bookshop asks Ingram and Draft2Digital, companies that distribute books to the site, to filter out A.I.-generated works. But he worries there is no reliable way to fully block them. With more than 800,000 self-published books available for purchase on the site, it’s inevitable that some slip through the cracks.
Other online retailers say they have been flooded with A.I. slop and are struggling to stay ahead of the torrent.
“We’re on the receiving end of an avalanche, an avalanche that is only going to get bigger,” said Michael Tamblyn, the chief executive of Rakuten Kobo, an e-reader producer and e-book retailer.
Last year, Kobo’s self-publishing platform rejected 45 percent of the books submitted. Of those, 85 percent were not accepted because Kobo determined them to be A.I.-generated.
“You can say, This probably isn’t a publisher, this is three LLMs in a trench coat,” Tamblyn said.
Other times, it’s a harder call. Kobo is now evaluating whether A.I. detection software, along with human review, can assess titles. But it’s becoming more difficult to catch scammers, who are using chatbots that produce more sophisticated prose, and can also use A.I. agents to create multiple accounts on publishing platforms.
Kris Austin, the co-founder and chief executive of Draft2Digital, which distributes independently published books to retailers, libraries and subscription services, said that the company saw an explosion of high volume uploads and low quality books over the last 18 months — a surge partly driven by A.I. He worries about how that will affect self-published authors, many of whom are struggling to find an audience in a flooded marketplace.
“This rise of low-quality slop, it’s threatening what the indie community has built,” he said.
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