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Idiosyncratic favorites
Tuhin Chakrabarty@TuhinChakr
🚨 New paper on AI and Copyright 🚨
It's easy to dismiss AI-written books 📚 as slop nobody buys. So, armed with full-text AI detection from @pangram, we studied self-published genre fiction books sold on Amazon from 2023 to 2026 March
Turns out Amazon is flooded with books
3:20 PM · Jul 28, 2026 · 120K Views
19 Replies · 136 Reposts · 469 Likes
Tuhin Chakrabarty@TuhinChakr
How we did it 📊: We randomly sampled 14,419 self-published genre fiction ebooks (less gatekeeping and low barrier to entry) and ran Pangram on the full-text to classify each book as substantial AI (>25%), light AI (<25%) and no-AI(0%).
Then we matched each book to a
3:20 PM · Jul 28, 2026 · 4.98K Views
2 Replies · 1 Repost · 36 Likes
Tuhin Chakrabarty@TuhinChakr
Books with substantial AI text are now everywhere: 1 in 5 books in our sample, across every genre - romance, thrillers, sci-fi, all of it. The typical book written with AI sells far fewer copies than the typical non-AI one. But there are so many of them that as a group they've
3:20 PM · Jul 28, 2026 · 4.28K Views
2 Replies · 5 Reposts · 43 Likes
Tuhin Chakrabarty@TuhinChakr
Here's the imbalance at the heart of the paper. Over 3 years, the books catalog grew 38x cumulatively. The book's revenue? Only 9x quarterly. Way more books fighting over a pie that barely grew which means the average book earns less than it used to. (4/n)
3:20 PM · Jul 28, 2026 · 50.8K Views
4 Replies · 5 Reposts · 55 Likes
Tuhin Chakrabarty@TuhinChakr
"Sure, but doesn’t it mean that cheap AI books are dragging the average down?" No, and this is our key result.
No-AI books, on their own, earn less per book than they did in 2023 in 7 of 8 genres. The one genre where human authors are doing better (+35%) is Fantasy/horror which
3:20 PM · Jul 28, 2026 · 3.69K Views
1 Reply · 6 Reposts · 37 Likes
Tuhin Chakrabarty@TuhinChakr
The more AI books enter a genre, the more ground non-AI books lose. Their hold on the top-chart spots slides from ~88% in the least-AI genres to ~63% in the most. And it's the worst in Kindle Unlimited-heavy genres since KU readers draw from one shared subscription pool, so every
3:20 PM · Jul 28, 2026 · 2.97K Views
1 Reply · 2 Reposts · 36 Likes
Tuhin Chakrabarty@TuhinChakr
The million dollar question : Who's producing these books? Authors who, once they started producing with AI, didn't stop but instead accelerated.
Among those who kept at it, 3 in 4 published faster than before, some hitting dozens of books a year.
The monetary earnings are
3:20 PM · Jul 28, 2026 · 4.65K Views
1 Reply · 3 Reposts · 44 Likes
^dynamic version of this from Zach Mazlish
^incredible. Are cumulated event studies basically fake? I’m going to say it, honestly I think cumulated event studies are basically fake, sorry!
More paper summaries
Matthew A. Kraft@MatthewAKraft
Brian Jacob gave a great presentation on the effect of schools adopting Yonder pouches to restrict cell phone use at #NBERSI2026.
The paper has generated lots of 🔥takes. I think it provides a window into the value & challenges of social science research.
nber.org/papers/w35132
1:42 PM · Jul 30, 2026 · 782 Views
1 Reply · 13 Likes
Philip Trammell@pawtrammell
Standard economic models of R&D don't feature "parallelization technology", or the bottleneck imposed by a lack of it.
This probably wasn't an important omission in the past, but it could be after an explosion in the number of AI agents able to carry out research autonomously.
7:16 PM · Jul 29, 2026 · 12.4K Views
3 Replies · 15 Reposts · 61 Likes
Kevin Corinth@kevincorinth
1/ New working paper: “Paying for Payment Errors: State Incentives and Caseload Responses to SNAP Cost Sharing.”
I study the incentives created by SNAP’s new state cost-sharing rules, and whether those incentives help explain the recent caseload decline.
aei.org
Paying for Payment Errors: State Incentives and Caseload Responses to SNAP Cost Sharing
4:09 PM · Jul 30, 2026 · 621 Views
1 Reply · 2 Reposts · 7 Likes
