Although Schickler says the book has earned him less than $100 since its January release, he only spent a few hours creating it with ChatGPT prompts like “write a story about a dad teaching his son about financial literacy.” “The idea of writing a book finally seemed possible.” Schickler’s self-published story, The Wise Little Squirrel: A Tale of Saving and Investing, is a 30-page children’s story - written and illustrated by AI - selling for $2.99 for a digital copy and $9.99 for a printed version. “I could see people making a whole career out of this,” said Brett Schickler, a Rochester, NY salesman who published a children’s book on the Kindle Store. It’s the latest example of AI-generated writing flooding the market and playing a part in ethically dubious content creation since the November release of OpenAI’s free tool. However, the actual number of bot-written books is likely much higher than that since Amazon’s policies don’t explicitly require authors to disclose their use of AI.

ChatGPT is listed as the author or co-author of at least 200 books on Amazon’s Kindle Store, according to Reuters.

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