great commentary, Gareth! -- expands upon & correlates well with my Daughter's experience as a Librarian in the local (Montgomery County, Maryland, USA) system ... and with my experience in nominating books for the Library to purchase ... 📚
a follow-up question you might investigate: how much trouble are libraries having with AI-generated books? -- AI seems to be an exponentially-growing problem in many online markets (and the situation is similarly horrid for crochet patterns, artistic designs, etc) 😔
Thanks, Mark. That's a good question! At the moment, there are no requirements for publishers to disclose that AI was used in text or images within a book (I think...), though some are choosing to do so voluntarily. In terms of indie publishing, there is a requirement with (e.g.) Amazon KDP for authors who upload to state whether AI was used in any way (and I think also with Ingram Spark). However, this seems to be information that these companies are collecting in case some future law is passed that mandates disclosure, as it does not appear on the book description page or anywhere else, that I'm aware of.
In terms of how libraries deal with this, then I would suspect that they employ the same criteria that they do for indie books in general: that it is well formatted and edited, has a professional cover, has good reviews, and there is a likelihood that someone will borrow it. Beyond that, it's difficult to know how they might tell if AI has been used. In certain egregious cases, this might be obvious (I'm thinking of the "AI style" that certain artwork has, and which is quite identifiable). But I would suspect that most AI generated books will fail on other counts (e.g. poor reviews).
great commentary, Gareth! -- expands upon & correlates well with my Daughter's experience as a Librarian in the local (Montgomery County, Maryland, USA) system ... and with my experience in nominating books for the Library to purchase ... 📚
a follow-up question you might investigate: how much trouble are libraries having with AI-generated books? -- AI seems to be an exponentially-growing problem in many online markets (and the situation is similarly horrid for crochet patterns, artistic designs, etc) 😔
Thanks, Mark. That's a good question! At the moment, there are no requirements for publishers to disclose that AI was used in text or images within a book (I think...), though some are choosing to do so voluntarily. In terms of indie publishing, there is a requirement with (e.g.) Amazon KDP for authors who upload to state whether AI was used in any way (and I think also with Ingram Spark). However, this seems to be information that these companies are collecting in case some future law is passed that mandates disclosure, as it does not appear on the book description page or anywhere else, that I'm aware of.
In terms of how libraries deal with this, then I would suspect that they employ the same criteria that they do for indie books in general: that it is well formatted and edited, has a professional cover, has good reviews, and there is a likelihood that someone will borrow it. Beyond that, it's difficult to know how they might tell if AI has been used. In certain egregious cases, this might be obvious (I'm thinking of the "AI style" that certain artwork has, and which is quite identifiable). But I would suspect that most AI generated books will fail on other counts (e.g. poor reviews).
But I shall ask!