AI生成的书籍涌入亚马逊，导致人类作者收入下滑

An analysis of more than 14,000 self-published Amazon books shows that AI-generated titles are displacing human authors through sheer volume, not quality. Revenue per book is falling even for titles where no AI text was detected. The researchers analyzed 14,419 randomly selected self-published e-books released between January 2023 and March 2026. For each title, they pulled daily sales figures from an internal dataset maintained by one of the five major US publishers. That dataset tracks about 500,000 Amazon titles and covers roughly 95 percent of all e-books sold daily on the platform, according to the researchers. Unlike earlier studies that tried to detect AI text from short book previews alone, the researchers classified each book based on its full text. They used the Pangram v3.3 detector, whose developers report a false-positive rate of 0.04 percent. Pangram 4 has since been released . Books were sorted into three bands based on the share of text flagged as AI-generated: none, light (up to 25 percent), and substantial (over 25 percent). Books with substantial AI content make up 20 percent of the catalog studied but account for only 12.1 percent of sales and 11.3 percent of revenue. Books with no detected AI text represent 62.9 percent of the catalog and generate 72.5 percent of revenue. At first glance, that seems to confirm the view that AI books remain low-quality "slop" stuck at the bottom of the market. The study shows that this view misses the real market dynamics, though. Between Q1 2023 and Q1 2026, the cumulative catalog grew 38.3x while the number of titles selling per quarter grew 19.2x. Quarterly revenue only grew 8.9x. Far more books are now competing for a revenue pool that's growing much more slowly. In six of eight genres, revenue per book dropped when comparing titles released in 2023 and 2025 over the same post-release window. Looking only at books with no detected AI text, revenue fell in seven of eight genres. That rules out the explanation that the average is dropping simply because poorly selling AI books are padding the catalog. The authors call this effect "dilution" but stress that their comparisons are observational and associational, not experimental proof of causation. The only exception is Fantasy/Supernatural/Horror, where AI text arrived latest and gained the least traction. There, revenue per book for titles with no detected AI text rose 35 percent. The researchers say this reversal argues against a general market trend as the cause. The patterns are stronger in genres with high Kindle Unlimited availability, where readers draw from a shared subscription pool. In those genres, the revenue-share lead of books with no detected AI text is 8.4 percentage points smaller than in genres with low Kindle Unlimited availability. The researchers attribute the gap to genre-specific traits and don't draw a causal link to Kindle Unlimited itself. The share of new Top 25 entries with substantial AI content rose from near zero to 31 percent over the study period. The top ranks also turned over faster. The share of books with no detected AI text that stayed in the Top 25 from one quarter to the next dropped as low as about 28 percent at one point before settling around 62 percent by the end of the study. Output is concentrated among a handful of prolific producers. Of 385 author identities that published more titles with substantial AI content after their first AI book, 287 increased their monthly output afterward. The highest-grossing pseudonym earned $1.7 million in gross revenue before platform fees across eight titles. The single highest-grossing book with substantial AI content brought in $643,000 on 80,431 copies sold. The study echoes the New York Times report on "Coral Hart," who reportedly published over 200 romance titles under 21 pen names in a single year and sold about 50,000 copies. AI spam extends beyond books, too. One man scammed millions of dollars through streaming platforms us