Amazon Limits Authors to Self-Publish 3 Books a Day to Combat AI-Generated Material

Amazon announced a limit on the number of books that can be self-published to their website, in an effort to combat the number of titles created by artificial intelligence. 

Users can now publish three books per day, according to Publisher’s Weekly. 

“While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations,” Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon’s e-book platform, announced on Monday. 

For the past several months, Amazon has faced a number of controversies related to the presence of AI-generated content on its website. In June, the bestseller pages were overtaken by a glut of AI-written books that listed fake authors and contained nonsensical prose. 

Many suspected that the AI books were a ploy to generate money because Kindle Unlimited allows readers to access as many books as they want, while the authors are paid by pages read rather than by book sales. 

While some of the fake titles uploaded to the website were merely an annoyance for would-be readers, others had more alarming consequences. 

Some of the books available on Amazon were purported to be guides for foraging wild mushrooms. When mycology enthusiasts looked over the books, however, they discovered that the likely AI-generated guides misidentified fungi – with errors that could potentially be deadly. 

Amazon deleted at least one of the suspicious titles from their website, after journalists reached out for comment. 

In another instance, an author discovered Amazon was selling AI-generated titles under her name. Jane Friedman said that a reader informed her of books that resembled her usual subject matter but were not actually written by her. 

Friedman was able to get the books removed from her Amazon profile but was still frustrated at the existence of “garbage books” bearing her name. 

“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,” Friedman wrote. 

In Monday’s announcement, Amazon said that they did not expect many publishers to be impacted by the policy change. Authors will also be able to seek an exemption from the rule if necessary. 

“We will continue to keep the interests of our authors, publishers, and readers at the forefront of our thinking and decision-making,” the company said.