Originality.ai study finds 63% of Amazon religion paperbacks likely AI-written

A new scan of Amazon’s Religion & Spirituality shelves found that 63% of sampled paperback titles were flagged as likely AI-written. In a blog post in August, Originality.ai said it examined 2,034 English-language paperbacks with at least a four-star average rating across 14 faith and belief categories. The firm scanned book descriptions, author biographies and in-book samples from titles published mostly between January and June, and used the sample text as the primary test, classifying anything scoring 50 or above as "Likely AI". As reported on 14 August, the company had already found AI-written ebooks spreading quickly across Amazon’s genre-fiction shelves. Originality.ai said 1,272 titles, or 63% of the sample, were flagged as likely written by large language models. It stressed that the detection system pointed to likely AI use, not proof of authorship. The highest shares were in witchcraft, where 78% of titles were flagged, followed by Hinduism at 76% and Taoism at 74%. At the other end were Satanism at 22%, atheism at 40% and Mormonism at 42%, though the study said those three groups had smaller sample sizes than the leading categories. Sikhism was the smallest sample, with 15 titles. When the study looked for books flagged as likely AI across all three text fields, Hinduism led with 72 books, or 25% of its sample. Taoism had 25 of 61 titles, or 41%, and witchcraft had 46 of 138, or 33%, while no Mormon books were flagged across all three. The study also said summaries were the element most likely to be AI-generated, even in books it judged likely human-written. Originality.ai said likely AI-written religion books were typically cheaper and shorter than likely human-written ones. The AI-likely titles averaged $16.84 and 170 pages, compared with $18.96 and 208 pages for books judged likely human-authored. The company argued that AI-written religious books could be used to prey on readers’ beliefs. It described religious digital content as fertile ground for AI "slop" and said authors may be using AI to capitalize on belief-driven publishing. It also offered a theory that non-native English speakers were using AI to enter the English-speaking market, which it said may help explain the higher AI rates in Eastern religion titles, while adding that it was not claiming a causal link between declining in-person communities and digital content consumption.