AI-generated books are reshaping creative markets through sheer volume and cost advantage, not quality—they're winning shelf space and sales share from human authors despite being lower-quality, raising serious questions about fair use and market harm in copyright law.
This paper analyzes 14,419 self-published fiction books on Amazon from 2023-2026 to measure the impact of AI-generated content. Using AI detection, researchers found that while AI-heavy books represent a small share of sales, they're growing rapidly and displacing human-written books—especially in genres with high AI adoption.