Grab your coffee, because I have thoughts.
AI has slowly worked its way into almost every corner of our lives. It helps us plan meals, organize schedules, brainstorm ideas, edit photos, answer ridiculous questions at 2 a.m., and apparently…
write entire books.
And as someone who absolutely loves books—the dog-eared pages, ridiculous annotations, staying awake way too late because one more chapter turned into seven—I have complicated feelings about that.
Because using AI as a tool?
I understand.
Having AI write an entire novel and then selling it alongside books that someone spent months or years pouring themselves into?
That’s where you lose me.
Wait… There Are Actually AI-Written Books?
Yep.
And they’re becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
A recent study looked at more than 14,000 self-published genre-fiction ebooks sold on Amazon between 2023 and 2026. Researchers found that books containing substantial amounts of AI-generated text are making up a growing portion of the market.
The interesting—and slightly alarming—part isn’t necessarily that these books are becoming wildly successful.
It’s the sheer volume of them.
AI makes it possible to generate enormous amounts of written content incredibly quickly. That means the publishing market can become flooded with books much faster than readers can realistically buy or read them.
And that matters for the person who spent a year writing their novel.
Especially when they’re now competing for the same search results, Kindle rankings, reader attention, and dollars.
And Honestly? That Bothers Me.
Maybe I’m overly sentimental about books.
Actually, scratch that.
I am definitely overly sentimental about books.
Part of what I love about reading is knowing there was another human being on the other side of those pages.
Someone imagined these characters.
Someone probably stared at Chapter 14 at midnight wondering why absolutely nothing was working.
Someone deleted 10,000 words.
Someone rewrote the ending.
Someone put pieces of themselves into fictional people we’ll never actually meet—and somehow made us care about them anyway.
That’s part of the magic.
As someone who used to write stories in her spare time, still dreams of one day publishing that story, and basically lived on Wattpad in her teenage years, the idea of typing:
“Write me a 90,000-word enemies-to-lovers fantasy romance with dragons.”
…and publishing whatever comes out?
I’m sorry.
I can’t pretend that feels the same.
But Here’s Where It Gets Complicated
Because obviously…
I use AI.
Quite a bit, actually.
I’ve used it to brainstorm blog ideas, organize my thoughts, plan content, work through creative blocks, and figure out how to turn the seventeen thoughts bouncing around my brain into something coherent.
So it would be pretty hypocritical for me to sit here and say:
AI + creativity = bad.
I don’t believe that.
I think there’s an enormous difference between:
“Help me figure out what I want to say.”
and
“Say it for me.”
That’s the line I keep coming back to.
Interestingly, Amazon makes a similar distinction with Kindle Direct Publishing. It separates AI-generated content from AI-assisted content.
If AI actually creates the text, images, or translations contained in a book, Amazon considers that AI-generated and requires the publisher to disclose its use to Amazon.
But if someone writes their own work and uses AI for things like brainstorming, editing, refining, or checking it, Amazon considers that AI-assisted.
And honestly?
That distinction makes sense to me.
Writers Have Always Used Tools
Spellcheck is a tool.
Grammarly is a tool.
Editors are part of the process.
Beta readers help writers find problems.
Google helps with research.
Writing software helps organize manuscripts.
And now AI can be another tool sitting in that toolbox.
If an author says:
“Something isn’t working with this character arc. Can you help me brainstorm why?”
I don’t suddenly think they didn’t write their book.
If they ask AI to catch repetitive phrases or help organize research?
Still their book.
If they brainstorm twenty fantasy town names and ultimately create their own?
Fine by me.
But if the characters, prose, dialogue, worldbuilding, and emotional moments are being generated primarily by AI…
Who am I actually reading?
That’s where things get uncomfortable.
There’s Another Problem: Trust
This may actually be my biggest concern as a reader.
How am I supposed to know?
AI-generated writing isn’t always obvious.
And that’s going to make trust increasingly important between readers, authors, and publishers.
We’re already seeing how serious those questions can become. In 2026, publishers have pulled or reconsidered major books after questions arose about whether generative AI was involved in their creation.
And that’s a pretty wild sentence to write.
I don’t particularly want to become an AI detective every time I buy a book.
I want to pick up something with a cute cover, read the description, immediately become emotionally attached to a fictional man, and move on with my life.
Then There’s the Question of the Authors AI Learned From
This is probably the messiest part of the entire conversation.
Generative AI doesn’t learn storytelling in a vacuum.
These systems are trained using enormous amounts of existing material, and authors have spent the last several years fighting over when and how copyrighted books should be included in those datasets.
That raises a question I don’t think readers should ignore:
If AI can learn from thousands of human writers and then generate books that compete against those same writers…what does that mean for the future of authorship?
I don’t have a perfect answer.
I don’t think anyone does yet.
But I think writers deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used.
What I Don’t Want to Lose
I’m actually not anti-AI.
Clearly.
I think it can be an incredible accessibility tool. I think it can help someone organize ideas when their brain feels completely overwhelmed. It can make intimidating creative projects feel possible. It can help small creators do things they couldn’t afford to hire an entire team to do.
I’ve experienced some of those benefits myself.
But I don’t want efficiency to become more important than creativity.
Especially with books.
I don’t want publishing to become a competition over who can produce the most content the fastest.
I want weird books.
Risky books.
Books that aren’t perfectly optimized.
Books with sentences that make me stop reading for a second because how did another human being think of that?
I want stories shaped by someone’s experiences, humor, heartbreak, obsessions, mistakes, and imagination.
AI can imitate patterns.
But the reason I read isn’t because I’m looking for the mathematically perfect arrangement of words.
I’m looking for connection.
So…Would I Read an AI-Generated Book?
Right now?
Probably not.
If AI helped an author brainstorm, edit, organize, or research their book?
That wouldn’t automatically bother me.
But if AI actually wrote most of the story?
I’d rather spend my money supporting the person who sat down and wrote theirs.
And maybe that’s ultimately where I’ve landed on all of this:
I don’t need authors to prove they never touched AI.
I just want to know there’s still an author behind the book.
A real person with something they wanted to say.
Because technology can help us tell stories.
I just don’t want it to become the storyteller.
☕🐉
Now I really want to know what you think.
Would you knowingly read an AI-generated novel?
Does it matter to you if an author uses AI during the writing process?
And where do you draw the line between AI-assisted and AI-written?
Because I have a feeling we’re going to be talking about this one for a long time.
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