The Amazon AI-pocalypse is Coming 

I've lurked around some of the writing subreddits that are very "anti-ai" in any capacity. And the funniest trend I've noticed will be the advice they give to new authors who want to be successful self-publishing on Amazon is to read a lot of the top-selling authors in their genre, model themselves after them and make sure they hit all the formulaic tropes. And then they get all uptight when you point out that they're just doing a lot of the same work that ai could handle but the hard way 😂😂

I think this will be a whole new product with its own audience. Like you said it’s more akin to gaming than to reading. In my opinion, when you read a book you don’t want to have to make decisions, you want to be surprised and hooked, whereas in gaming you want to affect the outcome and be immersed. I don’t think this will kill the industry, it’ll be a new one where, of course, authors will have to compete for 👀, just like they’re competing with social media, streaming, etc.

It's just like the line from The Incredibles. "When everyone is super, no one will be."

The problem with the story outline idea is that it is the same as the problem with the prompt engineer career. It will rapidly be displaced by a new model, LLM or not, or hybrid, that learns that process and then learns how to interact directly with the end-user to create both the story outline and the content. Yes there is still a need for talented prompt engineers for now, but basing a long term career on either of these ideas is sketchy business. We are all building sandcastles on a hurricane prone beach. As to reader hating AI, how many singers years ago said people hate auto-tune, which now dominates the music overwhelmingly? Unfortunately humans are drawn hypnotically to perfection. It's a brain hack that evolution used to drive animals to higher levels of complexity. But now, if we don't learn to love our imperfections, we are indeed in trouble.

Just programmed my Kindle Weaver: Genre - Prophecy, in the style of Orwell. Main plot: AI tech controlled by elite party members. Subplot: A global car ban to boost the horse and stable industry. Setting: Amazonia, where Prime drones deliver your thoughts. Plot Devices: Alexa-enabled devices eavesdropping on every conversation, ensuring Prime loyalty. Themes: One-Click Buying Utopia, where your desires are fulfilled before you even know them. Ending: The final merger, where Amazon acquires the government and renames it Prime Nation.

You know, I just thought of something. With the idea of a KDP Weaver, we, as authors, can do the same with our books. We can offer customized books of our novels based on customer requirements at a special price. With AI, you can feed in your novel, add the customer's requirements and include instructions on what to replace to push out a unique book, then go through it and touch it up some for the customer. The author modifies the story with some of the customer's information too, like Artist Proof paintings. Maybe for 100 USD as a physical book or 50 for an ebook (or something like that). how many parents wouldn't mind forking out 100 USD (or something like that) for their children to replace Harry and friends in a Harry Potter novel for their child's birthday? For the author, the first few would take longer but once you get used to what you are doing and the results of what Ai puts out, you can probably knock out a customized version of your novel in a short period of time.

In an age of digital imaging, we still have film photography. In an age of MP3 and streaming audio, we still have live performance and vinyl records. In age of interactive customized digital novels, we will still have people typing words on a typewriter and binding them on paper.

The fun of Novel AI is reading your own book as you're writing it. I'd love a tool that writes a whole book instead of a few paragraphs...

It seems like picking an outline and preferred tropes would be like getting major spoilers. There wouldn't really be any surprises. Some of my favorite reads have been getting surprised in the new way a particular book in a preferred genre broke away from the common tropes of that genre. I wouldn't have gotten that thrill if I had specified the tropes I wanted included in the story. I wouldn't want my selections to be that granular. Let me pick a genre, sub-genre, and rating that will determine the level of graphic content. Then surprise me with an exceptional story. No doubt AI is going to be doing it soon.

One thing for sure. Technology will always advance. You either learn to use it, or you will fall behind.

People don't see that most of entertainment (book, tv, movies, video games...) is just reskin/rehash of something. Just look at video games, when one indie game is succefull, you get 20 copies (more or less inovative) that follow until people get bored. AI will shine in giving you what you want. Best human author will give you what you don't know you want !

KDP before Weaver: ten million books nobody buys / reads. After KDP Weaver: ten billion books nobody buys / reads.

Great topic. I also believe that AI (in a few yea) will create books, video games, podcast audio-books and movies base on my preference. Is going to be the end of all streaming services and content provider. Keep bringing topics like to your channel. In a few years, people that said this is not going to happens, will have to come back to your channel and say: Yeah, he said if first. ja ja ja. I´m a content creator and thanks to your channel and private community, I´m getting an education on AI, so I won´t be replace so quickly. kudos for you Jason.

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Lots to think about. I will be interested to see how your ventures in animation and gaming progress. There are probably few authors who wouldn't like to see there stories adapted to a video format.

One of the joys of being a reader is following your favorite authors to see what they come up with next. I'm a writer on the side, yes. But when I pick up the next King novel, it's because I like to see what he cooked up next. That's it. I don't want to generate a story myself just for me and me alone to read. If I generate and edit a story, it's because I want it to be a piece of art that many others besides me can enjoy. And if I "create my own adventure," so to speak, and share it with others anyway... well, then I'm doing what I was originally doing and marketing a story I generated and edited. So it takes me right back around to the beginning. I think authors are always going to be needed, however they create their stories.

I work for an Education EDTech company , we build VR experiences that aligns with state standards including ELA, it is so fun to bring the stories to life.

Readers would probably enjoy it for the first few books and then when the novelty is gone they'll just read less and less and not know why reading doesn't touch them the way it used to.

Please consider more videos on how to build community and get 1000 True Fans and any AI tools that help without being spammy or creepy or pushy.

I had exactly the same idea! Can you imagine all your favorite stories in VR? It would be amazing!

Great video, thanks for saying so clearly why the panic is off base. I’ve never felt that audiences actually want to choose their own adventures beyond a few tries at it for the novelty. Readers and viewers want to sit down and enjoy a masterfully crafted experience.

im skeptical about this technology being used for readers creating their own books to read. readers are consumers. theyre going to want to read finished products. they may use ai to enter tropes or characters they want to read about and ai can give a lost of books to recommend. i rarely see readers asking for choose ur own adventure books. i think the technology might 11:54 work best for game developers, since they have seen more success in this area.

Without some type of controls on AI, the next short number of years will see authors become a dying breed.

Great post!

I think that after all the compensation and IP debates complete, the ones of the creator space who gain the most value in the long term will be those who are part of the most number of model data sets they can be a part of as a creator.

This fondly reminds me of those chose your own adventure books I read as a kid. Not the same thing of course, but it gave me a warm feeling to remember those days.

6:00 Do you have any suggestions of smaller ai models that can be used to write with no internet connection?

Not able to find much information on 'Ink It' tool. Any chance someone can drop a link? Curious what that tool is all about.

When I saw that "Kindle Weaver" story, I immediately thought of your video about their competitor. And I agree with you, I think most readers want to be told a story by a good storyteller. Those of us who want our own stories are increasingly writing them already. It is still a good while before an AI can rewrite a story from an African-American setting to a Jewish setting, for example. There are just so many details, unless the story is bland as white flour.

My end goal has always been making my books video games, I've also dabbled in Unreal Engine. I'd be interested to see what you do with it

Thanks! Great Video!

It is a real thing. I do exactly the same thing to create my own personal stories for my own enjoyment. I use gemini and claude to create my own stories, I use the story methods that you taught here and I create my own Romance novels that are hundreds of pages long.. There not bad, but they are highly censored. The trick is to try not to see things befor it is all written. The problem is that it repeats things like certain phrases.

Haha I really love your openness to AI!

I'm still watching, but wanted to drop an idea that came to me: We need something like the way music works when a band plays a bar. I'm not 100% on the details, but I know there is some kind of licensing thing going on with money being distributed from clubs that have cover bands. In the form of performance royalties I believe. There's nothing stopping writers from forming a group to use a similar structure for models that train on public data. Then, writers can join this (the way a musician joins ASCAP/BMI) and then there's no need to track each individual author.

talking about gaming it already kinda exist such as VISUAL NOVELs, mostly a big plot with a lot of choices that will yield a different ending everytime you do read it/play it. a new kind is adult VISUAL NOVELs many are to leads to a scene that are for "adults" and moving forward with one locks out other ones and so on. I believe its its own thing and I do believe not a lot would like to write their own story, writers will adapt to it like we already adapting to writing, you remember need a publisher back in the day some now has their own online blogs and websites and then being approached by publisher, these day AI assistants is helping us write, and more will evolve as we move forward. at lease that's my opinion hope you get the point I'm trying to make here

I don't think generative AI is going to survive. Too many people have too much tied up in existing copyrights for one thing. Another is, how can you copyright something written by something that isn't a legal entity? These AI companies are going to start getting hit with more and more lawsuits which will end up in court. there they will have to divulge how the AI generated content is developed. And once a jury sees that the content is generated by distilling it from existing content, they will lose. I follow you to keep informed about where generated AI is going in the authorship of books, but in my opinion AI should be outlawed. Its a Pandora's box.

I already mostly work with local 70B and 120B models instead of the public models.

I would love to have an AI-generated book to complete one of my favorite book series that was left on a bit of a cliffhanger, with a major plot point never resolved.. and I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to see a conclusion to the series. Being able to fairly compensate the author to finish the work with AI is absolutely reasonable, and something I have no doubt the other fans would be on board with. On a related note, my dream for many years now has been for AI to re-create my favorite movies with new cast members (a personalized reboot, if you will), make movie versions of my favorite books with whoever I want to cast, and expand my favorite tv series with new AI-generated episodes. The day when that is possible is fast approaching, and personally, I would be very happy to pay for the right to create new content in someone else's world, compensate actors for the right to use their likeness **within that context**, etc.

it would be great if u can make some videos about your journey when learning Unreal

Use of text is training data sets is one means of compensation. Another would be the prompts used to generate a story. Still another is creating the ability to 'de-trope' a narrative, so stories become new and fresh and not the same-old, same-old that we're being fed today.

Very interesting.

As an author I'm honestly not really concerned about AI generated books replacing human authors. I'm pro-AI, and even pro-AI in writing, so don't misunderstand this next statement. My concern is humans flooding the market with so much 100% AI written trash that the quality books written by serious authors will get buried in the noise and have a hard time being discovered. My issue is with the get rich quick schemes you see on RU-vid where some clueless wonder is telling everyone that AI can make them wealthy if the publish AI written books by the dozens every week. AI doesn't do a good job of writing, it's inaccurate, it's batty, and it often either makes stuff up, or it provides outdated information. AI is great for authors to help speed their development of a first draft. Most of your first draft is going to get replaced anyway in your 3rd or 4th edit, so there's no worry about copyright laws being violated. Those get rich quick schemes though are luring people to commit copyright violations, and if they are ever caught they will face up to 5yrs in prison and $250,000 per violation in fines. Not to mention the damage that they do to real authors that are trying to compete in an already flooded market.

We've been saying "it's coming" for about 2 years and it doesn't seem any closer yet. I'll believe it when I see it I guess. Right now Amazon seems happy to let everyone else create the books and passively take 30%, so I don't know if there's really a huge incentive for them to invest in creating something like Weaver.

I just keep thinking about the interactive holodeck novels from Star Trek lol. This type of customizable, reader-driven storytelling is something that I've wanted for decades and playing around with ai is the closest I've ever felt to actually having that experience. I'm looking forward to it 🙂

compansation models are a bandaid. Sure, do get paid for your contribution, but know it will then become AI training data, as all data is training data. from a company perspective, Compensation is a short term overhead issue. Once the models are strong enough, they will be trained on their own artificial data that you have already been paid for.

I mostly agree with you. Lost faith that Amazon was going to prioritize profit motive when they deplatformed Parlour.

I was a bit peeved at Alex for posting that. If you noticed the ending of the "article" he states "Let's stop the beast before it's coming." It was just stoking the fires of the anti-AI people against any that even suggests a desire to try the tools. I've pretty much abandoned author groups because of the bullying and hate of the vocal minority. It's a good thing there are some safe spaces for authors and artists to gain the knowledge you and others supply.

This reminds me of what D.W. Griffith did with his movie, The Birth of a Nation. He would go from town to town and send in agents to determine the ambience of the place. If the town was big on the idea that the Old South was great and got a raw deal after the civil war, he would send into their theaters a version of the movie that played up racism and portrayed the KKK as heroes. If the town was more progressive and liberal, he would send in a version of the movie with that stuff removed.

I can't disagree with your point about AI being good for consumers. But it seems to me to that lots of the news with AI is good for consumers and bad for producers -- and by 'producers,' I mean everything from doctors to teachers to authors to bank tellers. A world where we are all able to consume everything we want through AI, but don't need to produce/create anything because of AI is pretty close to a dystopia to me. A dystopia with lots of shiny new toys, to be sure. But a dystopia just the same. In the end people need to be needed. There is a very real threat of AI taking that away.

Omg lol I saw this article and didn’t know it was April fools. Hahaha so glad I heard it here that it was a joke so I didn’t spread the rumor lol

Amazon getting sued over their “buy” button’s operation is a bright spot for me. IMO once we purchase digital media we should be able to download for permanent ownership- even if said media is cut from the site due licensing.

The "technology" for a Weaver A.I. already nearly exists. A well crafted super prompt with Claude 3 Opus can create nearly finished pieces of literature. Character traits and appearances, setting, tone and other aspects can be easily changed. It's not perfect, it usually has a few errors or bits that would need editing in a final draft, but if a reader is a bit open minded, it works just fine for telling a story. And it's as bad as it is ever going to be. I assume that Claude 4 will be even better at prompt following. Authors in the near future will be selling their ideas and creativity more than the prose itself.

Hmm they sat it was a joke but I think they were using the date to get feedback on it. They wanted to see how people would react but have the safety net of april fools to fall back on if it caused a backlash. I don’t believe for a moment that it was a true April fools joke.

Declaring that authors should be compensated for using AI makes as much sense as declaring that painters should be compensated when people use photo cameras. I think that obvious copyright infringement (like creating another Harry Potter novel) is a concern that should be addressed (and will probably still be addressed in current copyright law). But you can't copyright ideas, nor prevent other people (whether they're humans or artificial minded) from using them in a general sense.

the new business model might be the same as franchise, the rights to use the 'universe' of said novel. such as making new characters and stories in harry potter's universe/worldbuilding. like a official fanfic.

Life echoes the copy machine. we replicate, adapt, and iterate. Just as creativity builds upon what came before, so should our laws. A UBI is going to be essential and would allow us to focus on innovation without fear. We need to rethink and rewrite copyright laws for a more equitable future.

FB writing groups still believe AI is a shakespearean sky net. only few of them think that AI is just another assistant

8:10 Yes, readers would enjoy it. That does not mean, it won't be dystopian. Huxley's Brave New World offers all its citizens a fulfilling and happy life.

This isn't a new idea. It's essentially the 'neverending story' that every reader who's become engrossed in a story universe wants. Customizing a story isn't new either. The very first books I owned were given to me as a baby in the 1970s. An adult would fill out a form with a child's name and some information about them and mail it off to company that had multiple book templates. A few weeks later, the kid would receive a book in the mail where they were the main character. The story templates were like a lengthy madlib with spaces to insert the child's name and information. Some were as simple as pages an employee would type the info into. Others had story chunks that were chosen and assembled based on the child. For example, a kid that liked to play sports would have a chunk about sports while a bookworm would have a different chunk in their story but the overall plot would be the same.

Yeah, every time I find a fantasy series I like, it eventually comes to an end. I have been dreaming of AI that could just keep writing stories in the same vein, or set in the same fictional world, perhaps narrated in my favourite voice. I feel the same about animated series, which I also enjoy. I would like nothing more than a favourite series which never ended, though punctuated by periodical resolutions of story lines, of course. I don't feel like I am overflowing with content options - I have to look for a long time and wade through tons of content to find something I find even remotely engaging. When I finally do find it, it's like striking gold. I would love for there to be much more of the type of content of the style, having the tropes, told in the temperament, etc., that I find most compelling, and if AI could help generate such content, I think there is a market for it. But it doesn't help the people who make a living from writing, or making movies, etc. I see that. But I think automation will soon remove the ability for 99,99% of people from making a living doing anything, so I think we are all in the same boat, and will have to make a fundamental change to the way our society and economy functions and how we distribute resources and life's necessities. Better to find a general way to make society work for everyone, than to try to go profession by profession and try to find solutions which won't result in a natural state of affairs but will be a temporary remedy in a neverending battle against the forces of change.

Why don't you think AI will build fandoms? There are already many "AI instagram models" and "AI anime music artists" that already have pretty big fandoms.

This is an interesting (scary) idea, but I feel like most people are generally too lazy to even select parameters and roll a book. Especially since they may get 20 pages in a realize the story isn't what they were looking for and need to re-roll the book. I suspect traditional publishers will have a comeback in the coming years as gatekeepers of good content against the wave of trash that's coming.

I'm one of those authors against AI mainly due to the way it is being used to mass produce books and flood the market even more than it is already flooded. There's also the irritation (for lack of a better word in this format) in having someone who used AI to write the book for them calling themselves and author when they've not gone through the process of learning to actually write, the time of perfecting the craft and tuning it. People want an easy, quick buck and have been using AI to that end. I'm also a realist and I don't see it going away anytime soon (there's too much money involved), but I will personally never respect someone who has AI do all the work while they sit by and get all the credit for something that many of us have spent years getting better at. There's using AI to edit or help with ideas and then there's what the majority out there are doing and using it to write the whole thing. It's similar to an athlete who spent years working and training to be the best at what they do, only to have someone come up using steroids that takes the win at the last second. I am all for banning AI books in general, or at a minimum exposing them using special tags.

The "solution" to democratization of availability is qualitative differentiation.

Hi. What AI detector/humanizer tool do you recommend? Any free options?

This fake article was probably a feeler to see how people would respond to it and I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon was working on a project like this. I can tell you that with the models now, it is "possible" to implement, but if something like Weaver was creating books on the fly, based on a few checkboxes, they would be utter garbage if written solely by AI.

As a former book cover artist I was suprised by how many writers embraced AI Art without really thinking through the implications of the technology for their own craft. Sadly I think any attempt to compensate writers for the use of their work in training these machines will meet the same obstacles that artists are struggling with- current copyright laws do not prevent anyone from taking your art or writing and training an AI by using that material. If anything writers trying to potect their own unique voices will find it even more difficult than Artists trying to protect their unique visual styles- there is no way at present to do this as 'style' is a fairly nebulous concept that does not lend itself to legal definition. So if some AI company were to take your body of work and use it to train an AI to write in your 'voice' there is no way to stop them under present law. The notion of the 'custom made book' is coming for sure- just as AI Art programmes allow people to eliminate the Artist there will be AI's designed to eliminate the writer, were the manuscript will be entirely authored by AI. Will these AI books be as good as those written by humans- I doubt it. Personally I am never going to invest my time in reading a novel pumped out by a machine because to me that is a pointless thing to do. But, sadly, there will be many who do not care, just as there are many people who don't care if the Art they use is made by an Artist or an AI. In the long term I believe that the limitations of generative AI will become apparent- it's inherent lack of genuine creativity will eventually begin to manifest- but this may take some time and for the present the danger is that the writers, artists and musicians whose income depends of their work will be swept away and replaced by AI generated 'content' that superficially seems ok, but in end will prove to be unsatisfying and repetitive.

Also don't assume readers want to do work and feel indecisive about a story. Customization won't be universal.

I will always write My stuff with the mind. Sure I need an editor to flesh things out but the whole book is my idea. Its a shame that ppl can call themselves authors now.

I’m not an opponent of AI nor am I complacent, but I know when a. At has been released from a bag and you are NOT catching that cat again. Monitor, adjust and compensate where you can - AI is not going away. Work on laws to protect IP, but be aware the corporations that will most benefit from using that IP are the same ones that own your politicians.

i would love to just get rid of all books on amazon with certain things in them (i like romance novels - please minus fairy tales, reverse harem, sex scene) etc.

what will humans be left to do?

Most people are too lazy to design their own stories. They pay to not have to do that. They already have this kind of thing for music and all the music is bad and nobody pays for it.

Compensation isn't going to happen. If Sam Altman said that it's because he knows there's no way in hell and he's trying to scare other AI developers from competing with him like he always is does. Legally you're allowed to clip 10 seconds of audio or video of someone else's work to use it in your own. If you think anyone is getting paid for having their story being ones of millions a large language model is trained on idk what to tell you. There are plenty of lawyers around happy to take your money "to try" though. Can any author really say they didn't take inspiration from other books? Much more inspiration than maybe possible extracting a little bit of a pattern from their story in an ocean of millions of stories. Besides, the patterns AIs pull are from all the similarities in stories, not the uniqueness. Anything it may have taken from your story is only that which other stories did a whole heap of times too. An AIs job is to realistically mimic human beings by picking out the statistically most used patterns. Anything it uses is something thousands of other writers already wrote before you did, why don't you owe them all compensation too is a question you better figure out unless you want any lawsuit to backfire on you.

Copyrights willl be a thing of the past. You can take any author and easily prove that they were inspired (trained) by another author. That's how our brain works we copy everything.

Data contamination you kill this trend very rapidly, making every story looks blend, flat and just like any other, just permutating characters and setting, boring people to death.

The anti AI energy comes from people that say the word “Artist” and “Author” in a specific way. Pride cometh before the fall. Get over yourselves, all the mainstream artwork is regurgitated “inspiration” at this point. Bye!

Should upcoming authors pay compensations for all the authors that inspired them and influenced their writing style?

boycott order all Amazon products onlines. This will hurt many business.