Who cares? This is both my initial reaction and, on reflection, something I’m genuinely curious about. If one can’t tell the difference without deep investigation, the consumer likely doesn’t care (I don’t). Hopefully / presumably it would still go through whatever editorial controls are in place. So who does care? If this is rooted in fears of our jobs being taken, the train has left the station and we need to deal…
Maybe that works for pure entertainment. I buy a lot of books, including a lot of nonfiction. I care quite a bit about the author. There's a lot of garbage out there with just flat wrong information. One of the few things you have to go on is an author's reputation. Which, if you're making that up, becomes a garbage signal, and something approaching fraud. So for now at least, any outfit that publishes something that…
For now, gen ai has enough issues that a human should probably be in the loop, either as a collaborating author or editor. At some point, that will probably change and that is okay with me.
You also make a good point about why buy books. Perhaps at some point gen ai will be good enough to generate high quality, true, and personalized info such that we won’t have to!
The fraud issue is interesting. I personally disclose when I use genai. But I wouldn’t be offended if someone else didn’t. Again, if I trust someone, I trust them to use the tool responsible. If I don’t, I’d take what they say with a grain of salt anyway.