Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt recently sat down with NBC News, and he said something that has been percolating in my mind. When asked about AI-written books, Daunt said, “Yes, I have actually no problem selling any book, as long as it doesn’t masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn’t, and that it has an essential quality to it, and that the customer, the reader, wants it.”
On the surface, that sounds perfectly sensible. As long as readers can clearly see the label, they can make a choice. But if you take a moment to think about it, there are important questions that this approach leaves unanswered.
Is “just label it” really good enough?
Barnes & Noble is one of the most powerful retailers in the publishing world. When the largest retail bookseller in the United States signals that AI-written books are welcome on its shelves, it sends a message to publishers, agents, and authors alike that this is a legitimate product category.
Think about what a real book represents. A writer spent months, sometimes years, researching, writing, revising, creating a concoction, and then pouring it onto a page. Not only that, everything a writer puts on the page is colored with the lens they formed with their life experiences. That’s what makes books human, and why we sometimes read books covering the same topic from different writers.
AI, on the other hand, takes everything it learned from the generation of human experience, strips the humanity, and serves the slop. Yes, the book might have the best grammar, the best plot structure, and even a good story. But will it have the human touch that makes a book special? I think not. At best, it can pretend, using the knowledge it stole from the great books written by human authors.
The moment a major retailer shrugs and says AI books are fine as long as they’re labeled, it starts chipping away at the understanding that a book is a human endeavor. Also, who decides what constitutes an AI-written book and what the label looks like? Is it enough if the label is hidden obscurely on some page, where no one can find it unless they are looking for it?
Even if they have a clear label, so what? Will you let a thief enter your home, as long as they wear a label saying they are one? It’s ridiculous. And make no mistake; any AI-written book, no matter how good it is, is a thief parading in costume, which has stolen the stories from human-written books, without consent.
The human cost of letting AI books in our bookshops
Every bookshop has a limited space. If we allow AI books to enter our bookshops, it doesn’t create a space out of a vacuum. Every AI book taking a shelf space is replacing one written by a human. And without a proper system in place, which Barnes & Noble doesn’t seem to have, it would be hard for a reader to differentiate between a human and an AI-written book.
Daunt even acknowledged that Barnes & Noble might already be selling AI-written books without knowing it. “We have 300,000 titles across all of our stores. Do we think that some of those may be AI? The chances are that they are, but we’re not really conscious of them,” he said in the NBC News interview. That is not the reassuring admission he thinks it is.
What you see is what you buy. If thousands of readers walk into the store and see AI books prominently placed, some of them are bound to pick one up. It will make money for some mega corporation or AI-bro who has started treating books as his new side business. That’s a sale that could have gone to an author who actually deserved it.
I am not saying all human-written books are great. I have written some bad ones myself. But even if a book is bad or just not your taste, you know someone put real effort into it, so the hit on the purse doesn’t sting that much.
Think how you will feel if your books were written by a prompt? Also, since AI can generate books at a much faster rate than we can write them, if we open the doors to these books, the market will be flooded. The e-book market is already filled with AI slop; we don’t want our bookstores to look the same.
This is not happening in a vacuum
It would be one thing if Barnes & Noble were making this call in isolation. But this is part of a much larger and deeply troubling pattern.
Vox Media and The Atlantic both signed deals with OpenAI, allowing the company to train its models on their entire content archives. The New York Times signed its first AI content licensing agreement with Amazon. USA Today, Condé Nast, and Hearst have also signed multi-year licensing deals with Amazon.
AI licensing deals are now becoming a big source of revenue for publishers. So publishers are getting paid, and that money is making these deals feel justified. As for the writers whose work is being used to train these models? Most of them are seeing nothing.
The pattern is clear here. First, media companies license their content to AI. Then AI uses that content to generate new content. Then retailers agree to sell that AI-generated content. This will repeat until all human writers are fired and all of us are left with a steaming pile of AI slop in our hands, wondering how we got here.
Books are one of the last places where human creativity has not been fully colonized by AI. Opening that door, even with a label slapped on it, is a precedent the industry will struggle to walk back. Some doors should remain closed, no matter how lucrative the prize behind them seems to be.