In Brief:
- Generative AI is most often used to produce nonfiction and children’s picture books. These have errors, sentences that don’t make sense and other issues that undermine quality and readability.
- Librarians don’t have time to read every book they add to their collection, so they need to rely on other clues to filter out low-quality books written with generative AI.
- Libraries may eventually carry AI-written books on their shelves — but it will depend on how the public comes to feel about questions of art and authorship.
A picture book about rabbits claiming the animals can make their own clothing. Mushroom Foraging Guides so inaccurate that the New York Mycological Society tweeted out a warning about the potentially deadly errors. A nonfiction book apparently imitating another release with the same title — but with awkward sentences and a mysterious author.
These are the kind of AI-written books that librarians now contend with when procuring new titles for their patrons. They have to filter out this kind of AI slop when selecting for their collections and they need to find and flag poor-quality AI content on e-book borrowing platforms like Hoopla.
Fortunately, while there’s a lot of AI-written nonsense out there, “it’s pretty easy to spot,” says Kate DeMeester-Lane, library services manager for Pima County Public Library in Arizona. These aren’t sophisticated mimics like deepfakes, she says — the first pages quickly reveal that the book is AI-generated, because “the content doesn’t make sense” or the syntax will be wrong.
But libraries don’t have time to read every book they’re considering before purchasing it. They often buy their books online from wholesalers or get e-book and audiobook content from borrowing platforms like OverDrive and Hoopla. Librarians may not get an in-depth look at a physical book until it arrives, instead relying on information like reviews to decide whether it seems worth buying.
Fortunately, checking book reviews and author information can help indicate if a book was written by AI.
When you get a suspicious book, “you look it up to see what else the [author] has written. And you see there's 30 things, and none of them have any reviews, and they were all written in the last two years,” DeMeester-Lane says. Typically, AI-generated books list an author with little to no digital footprint. And while a small or lacking online presence could indicate a new author just starting out, it takes humans time to write. One book every year or so is normal; dozens of titles per year start looking quite suspicious.
Some librarians also try checking the book’s copyright records. Text generated by AI isn’t copyrightable unless a human author has selected, arranged or modified that text in a “sufficiently creative way.” As such, records may indicate whether a book, or parts of it, are excluded from copyright due to AI use.
Librarians may also want to exercise extra caution if the title is a bestseller, as some scammers use AI to impersonate more popular books.
So far, DeMeester-Lane has mostly encountered AI-generated nonfiction and children’s picture books.
That’s because “AI is not at a point yet where it could construct a great story and write it well,” DeMeester-Lane says. But AI’s weakness at storytelling is less of an obstacle when it’s used to generate basic picture books with short, simplistic sentences, or to write nonfiction where the tool can compile information available on the Internet (although such books still tend to be full of inaccuracies).
While Pima County Public Library currently strives to avoid AI-generated books entirely and remove such content from its Hoopla offerings, the library does not have an official policy against AI-produced content. For one, the library is waiting to see what the American Library Association decides (in June, the organization announced plans to develop an official position on AI and libraries). But also, the bad quality of AI-produced books means the library has no real choice except to keep them off shelves for the moment.
Today’s AI-generated books are “quite bad,” DeMeester-Lane says. “It doesn't feel like, ‘Hmm, this is not great, but I could totally see that a person wrote this.’ It's sort of like, ‘Did an alien write this?’”
In general, the library’s philosophy is to carry controversial picks so that people can read them and make up their own minds. If generative AI advances to the point where it produces a book that is readable and somewhat popular, the book could become controversial, and “we absolutely would purchase it in order to satisfy public demand [and] curiosity,” DeMeester-Lane says.
Ultimately, the library is here to serve the community, and the question is up to them:
“Where's the public going to land on the question of AI?” DeMeester-Lane says. “Are they going to land on the side of authors as creators and artists and be kind of like, ‘No, we don't want to read any AI no matter what.’ Or are they going to land on the side of, ‘Well, if it's a good story, I want to read it. I don't really care where it came from.’”
