Waterstones would sell books written by AI, says chain's boss (www.bbc.co.uk)

submitted 1 day ago by i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk to c/unitedkingdom@feddit.uk

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The headline here is a bit misleading, what he actually said was:

"Who's to know? [Technology firms] are spending trillions and trillions on AI and maybe it's going to produce the next War and Peace.

"And if people want to read that book, AI-generated or not, we will be selling it - as long as it doesn't pretend to [be] something that it isn't.

"We as booksellers would certainly naturally and instinctively disdain it," Daunt said.

Readers value a connection with the author "that does require a real person", he added. Any AI-generated book would always be clearly labelled as such.

My revised headline is:

Waterstones boss would rather not sell books generated by AI, but might if they are correctly labelled.

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[-] flamingos@feddit.uk 11 points 1 day ago

What's your point?

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Computer based art was being used to sell books in bookstores 40 years ago.

They didn't really sell well, and now, barely anyone remembers it was a thing.

[-] flamingos@feddit.uk 3 points 13 hours ago

And that relates to a book shop selling LLM-written books how? Digital artists still draw what's attributed to them, an AI author hasn't written what's attributed to them.

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world -1 points 13 hours ago

AI is a little bit more complicated than that due to the flaws that pop up in generating.

For example, here are some AI comic books that were created. What the author did was write the overall story, then used an AI prompt to create each panel of the comic.

Each panel took dozens to hundreds of attempts, out of which the author made the artistic decision to choose the best one.

https://aicomicbooks.com/

"The Lesson" is probably my favorite of the bunch, but they're free to download, check them out.

https://aicomicbooks.com/book/the-lesson-book-by-steve-coulson-download-now/

this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025

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