Evidence of unfair use: AI books squeeze human authors out of the market

Anthropic's recent acquisition of millions of used books to train its AI models and subsequently destroy the physical copies has raised concerns among regular people. However, this action is within the bounds of copyright law, which permits digitizing owned books without creating additional copies. A federal judge ruled that this process adhered to the principle of fair use. The primary concern remains the impact of AI-generated content on the market once the training is complete.

In response to this issue, the US Copyright Office examined the problem last year and identified a significant shortcoming in AI companies' arguments. One of the four fair-use tests requires evaluating whether the new work negatively affects the market for the original. The Copyright Office concluded that using copyrighted works to generate commercial content that competes with those works goes beyond the limitations of traditional fair use. Proving this has been challenging until now.

A recent study analyzed over 14,000 ebooks sold on Amazon between 2023 and 2026, revealing the presence of substantial amounts of AI-written text in many of them. This phenomenon has led to a 19-fold increase in the number of books with sales, as well as a ninefold rise in the total revenue generated by those books. Consequently, the overall market has become more crowded without the proportional growth in revenue, leaving less income for the average title.

Moreover, books without any AI text detected have experienced a loss in market share as AI-generated books proliferate.

Ed Newton-Rex, CEO of the nonprofit Fairly Trained, highlighted that AI companies have claimed their models do not financially harm the creators whose work they utilized during training. This research effectively debunks this argument. As AI can generate thousands of books at negligible costs, human authors are now competing against a deluge of new content that would not have existed without their original work.