A non-exhaustive tour of the territory:
The Early Experiments
The early experiments — before modern LLMs, researchers and artists used earlier systems to generate text. 1 the Road by Ross Goodwin (2018) was generated by an LSTM-based system trained on road trip literature, printed on a receipt roll during an actual road trip. A fascinating object. Not really a novel in the narrative sense.
The Sudowrite Generation
The Sudowrite generation — some of the earliest sustained human-AI novel collaborations happened in the pre-public beta period of Sudowrite, which was built on GPT-3 before the API was publicly available. These are the books that have the strongest claim to being genuinely first — and most of them were not widely publicized.
The Post-ChatGPT Wave
The post-ChatGPT wave — after ChatGPT’s public launch in late 2022, the number of AI-involved books in self-publishing exploded. Amazon’s categories for romance, fantasy, and science fiction in particular saw significant volume increases driven by AI-assisted or AI-generated titles.
Disclosed Collaborations in Mainstream Press
Disclosed collaborations in mainstream press — a handful of authors have written publicly about using AI in their process. These tend to be literary writers or journalists exploring the technology, not genre authors publishing at volume.
The Quality Distribution
The quality distribution — AI-involved books range from the genuinely interesting (where a skilled author has used AI to extend their creative range) to the obviously mechanical (where the machine is clearly running the show). The former get read and discussed. The latter mostly sink without trace.
The map of what exists is still being drawn. What we can say is that the category “book written using AI” is too broad to be meaningful without understanding the specific relationship between human and machine in the creative process.
This article is part of the AI & The Novel series on Indignified.com. All articles reflect the author’s research and perspective and do not constitute legal or financial advice.