Barnes & Noble’s parent company already addressed this, though. The concern was raised that if AI was used to write books, they would not be allowed to sell them or there would be controversy there. The parent company said their job was simply distribution and management, they would leave it up to local shop managers to decide what to display and where.
So yes, it’s the other side (real books made by genAI, as opposed to titles of books that don’t exist hallucinated by chatbots), but still kind of the same issue. Books actually written by genAI and published would be given an ISBN and you’d be able to look it up, same as a book written by a human. Titles that are hallucinated could be debunked by checking the same ISBN system, which is open, so ChatGPT and the like should be checking it. Of course, ISBN does not index fan fiction, and may not even index popular fan fiction, such as The North Remembers, the 500k±word story that finishes A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones books) after the author abandoned the series. Or that one popular Harry Potter fic people like. Of course, it would index fan fiction that gets published traditionally, such as the “50 Shades of Grey” series (which started out as Twilight fan fiction). And human-created slop that, like genAI slop, pieces together stuff made by other humans, like Eragon did.
Barnes & Noble’s parent company already addressed this, though. The concern was raised that if AI was used to write books, they would not be allowed to sell them or there would be controversy there. The parent company said their job was simply distribution and management, they would leave it up to local shop managers to decide what to display and where.
So yes, it’s the other side (real books made by genAI, as opposed to titles of books that don’t exist hallucinated by chatbots), but still kind of the same issue. Books actually written by genAI and published would be given an ISBN and you’d be able to look it up, same as a book written by a human. Titles that are hallucinated could be debunked by checking the same ISBN system, which is open, so ChatGPT and the like should be checking it. Of course, ISBN does not index fan fiction, and may not even index popular fan fiction, such as The North Remembers, the 500k±word story that finishes A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones books) after the author abandoned the series. Or that one popular Harry Potter fic people like. Of course, it would index fan fiction that gets published traditionally, such as the “50 Shades of Grey” series (which started out as Twilight fan fiction). And human-created slop that, like genAI slop, pieces together stuff made by other humans, like Eragon did.