Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
AI-generated content
authorship suspicion
marketplace reviews
reader response
star ratings
"Is This Book AI-Generated?"How Authorship Suspicion Manifests in Marketplace Reviews
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the research gap regarding readers' negative response mechanisms toward suspected AI-generated books. Drawing on 863 cross-category low-star reviews of Amazon bestsellers, it employs large-scale text mining to conduct multi-level quantitative analysis. The work innovatively proposes a dual suspicion mechanism comprising "thematic concentration" and "trace detection," systematically distinguishing between contextual and confirmatory suspicion. Results indicate that reader skepticism is significantly concentrated on generative AI books, with high ratings frequently obscuring severe content quality deficiencies. By revealing the manifestations and underlying causes of suspicion toward AI authorship, this research offers new perspectives for understanding reader cognition at the boundaries of human-machine co-creation.
📝 Abstract
As AI becomes part of how books are authored, reader response to suspected AI authorship grows more consequential, yet remains unexamined. We analyze 863 low-star reviews of 78 Amazon bestsellers across 8 categories at three levels of proximity to AI. Suspicion concentrates in Generative AI books (35.1%) but appears in every category, including Gardening (5.7%). Reviews citing AI authorship complain more about shallow content and poor presentation than other critical reviews. Suspicion takes two forms: ambient, where"AI-generated"is a generic complaint about formulaic writing, and corroborated, where reviewers of the same book independently cite concrete evidence. We propose two mechanisms by which suspicion arises: topical concentration, where a book's AI subject matter supplies vocabulary for quality complaints, and artifact detection, where readers notice ChatGPT-style formatting regardless of topic. Star ratings can hide this suspicion: the most-flagged book holds 4.1 stars while 50% of its critical reviews cite AI authorship.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
AI-generated content
authorship suspicion
marketplace reviews
artifact detection
reader response
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