Dear Amazon, Why Do You Care If AI Was Used?

Put Down the Pitchforks, Everyone.

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I know some people see the all-caps AI in my handle and assume I am automatically pro-AI everything.

I am not.

That feels important to say up front, because this conversation gets stupid fast. The second you say anything other than “AI is destroying all human creativity,” some folks assume you are trying to replace everyone and everything with a chatbot.

That is not where this piece is going.

My whole connection to AI is that I teach this stuff to small business owners.

Practical, busy people trying to write better emails, improve their marketing, organize ideas, and save time, without hiring an 18-person agency.

To me, AI is a tool.

It isn’t a substitute for taste and good judgment.

So when I see the anti-AI folks grabbing their pitchforks over whether AI was used in a book or a blog post or a video or song, I hang my head in shame that my species continues to do what it do.

Every new technology meets with resistance when it first arrives. AI is this on steroids. We even have people right here on Medium hoping Amazon will suppress, limit, or otherwise bury books just because AI might somehow venture into the writing process.

I’m not here to speak on behalf of the robots, but I can’t help feeling this sounds like the wrong “fix.”

Who cares if AI helped in some way, large or small, to create a book?

The only question that should matter is if the book (or movie or song or whatever) is any good.

AI didn’t invent garbage.

Let’s get something out of the way: Amazon had plenty of awful books for sale before generative AI became everyone’s favorite panic button.

There were already badly edited books. Scammy books. Fake “bestsellers.”

There were already authors gaming obscure subcategories long enough to slide “No. 1 bestselling author” into their bio.

I can think of one horror book in particular that still annoys me. I won’t name the author (indie person), but for a few weeks back in 2013, he made a pretty good haul on an “Amazon bestseller” horror book about a school shooting with a touch of demonic possession.

Intriguing enough in premise. Cover was decent.

It had a pile of glowing five-star reviews that, in retrospect, had to have been bought and paid for.

Then I read it.

The story had holes you could drive a bus through. The grammar was rough. The spelling errors were everywhere.

The emotional weight of the premise was not handled with the care it deserved.

You didn’t need to be an English teacher to see the problems. You just needed eyes and a functioning brain.

Still, for a little while, the author was perched in a top slot in some tiny category, and then proceeded to boast all over the web about his accomplishments while dropping a metric crap-ton of other human-created “slop.”

That happened without AI.

So when people act like low-quality books are a brand-new technological crisis, I have a hard time buying it.

The Kindle store has always had a quality-control problem.

GenAI may have made the problem easier to mass-produce, but the disease was already there.

To be clear, I understand why some authors are angry.

There are real problems here.

AI-generated knockoffs, spammy summaries, fake author bios, misleading covers, junk health advice, and books designed to hijack search results are not harmless.

Authors have already found what appear to be AI-generated imitations and summaries of their books showing up on Amazon, and that’s a direct attack on real writers’ livelihoods.

In another instance, a 2025 study found a large share of Amazon herbal remedy titles reviewed by an AI-detection firm were likely written by AI.

(Now we’re heading into the realm of unverified health advice that could do some physical damage.)

It’s content pollution.

If a book is plagiarized, deceptive, unsafe, falsely attributed, review-manipulated, or presented as expert guidance when nobody with expertise was involved, Amazon (or whoever) should bury it, remove it, and punish the seller.

But that’s different from saying every book with AI assistance deserves to be treated as suspicious.

Amazon’s own Kindle Direct Publishing guidelines already distinguish AI-generated and AI-assisted content. If an AI tool created the actual text, images, or translation, Amazon says that must be disclosed.

If a human created the work and used AI for brainstorming, editing, refinement, or error-checking, Amazon says that does not have to be disclosed.

“AI was involved” can mean a lot of things.

There’s a huge difference between “write me a horror novel” and using AI to organize research notes, test jacket copy, tighten pacing, clean up typos, brainstorm chapter titles, or get unstuck during a revision.

Treating them like they’re the same makes you seem lazy, ignorant, and, if left unchecked, downright hysterical.

AI is just another tool.

An advanced tool, but a tool nonetheless.

Just like spell-check.

Just like Grammarly.

Just like Photoshop and Canva and a thesaurus.

We already accept that creative work is often assisted. The question has never really been, “Was a tool involved?” The question is, “Who made the creative decisions, and were they good ones?”

If an author uses AI to revise awkward sentences, catch continuity errors, or explore alternate outlines, I don’t see why readers should automatically care.

I sure don’t.

Readers care about experience, story, accurate information, authenticity.

And authenticity is possible with or without AI. So is phoniness.

I only care whether the writer or filmmaker or artist respected my time.

Quality should win, nothing else.

I would rather read an AI-assisted book that’s clear, engaging, well-edited, and honest than suffer through another piece of human crap propped up by fake reviews and algorithm games.

Human-made does not automatically mean good. AI-assisted does not automatically mean bad.

There is plenty of soulless human writing. There is also plenty of AI-generated sludge. The dividing line is care versus laziness.

That’s the standard Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, or any other platform should use.

Punish deception, plagiarism. Unsafe garbage. Review manipulation. Punish spam and people flooding the marketplace with low-effort duplicates.

Amazon already says it prohibits attempts to manipulate customer reviews through false, misleading, or inauthentic content. That’s the kind of behavior worth targeting.

But don’t punish a writer just because they used a modern tool somewhere in the process. That’s like judging a meal by whether the chef used a food processor.

The diner only cares if the dinner is good.

I think a lot of the current AI hysteria is going to feel silly in five years.

Maybe sooner.

Not all of it. Some concerns are legitimate. Copyright questions, deepfakes, slop, misinformation, creative exploitation, and labor concerns, are all problems we should work to address.

But blanket panic? The idea that any AI involvement automatically contaminates a creative work?

That’s silly and bordering on discriminatory.

AI will become a normal part of movies, comics, books, marketing, games, music production, education, and almost every other corner of pop culture. Not because everyone loves it. Not because every use is good. But because useful tools tend to stick around.

And it will allow many people who have something worthwhile to say an avenue for communicating that would have otherwise been unavailable to them.

And one more thing: Amazon is not staffed by idiots.

Whatever people think of the company, it understands incentives, customer trust.

It understands that the Kindle store cannot become an endless landfill of bot-written junk without damaging the buying experience.

But Amazon also understands a blanket anti-AI approach is too blunt to work. The company has to care about reader satisfaction, refund behavior, reviews, complaints, content quality, publishing abuse, and whether a book violates guidelines. It also has to avoid punishing legitimate authors who use AI in limited, responsible ways.

“AI involvement” should not be a scarlet letter.

A bad book is still a bad book if a human wrote every word.

A good book is still a good book if the author used AI to help.

Judge the work.

I am not asking anyone to lower their standards for AI-assisted work. Actually, I think we should raise the standards. And as the technology continues to develop, I think it will rise to meet them, but only in the hands of capable creators.

If someone uses AI to publish faster and the product is still coherent, what do I care? What should any of us care if a human is still behind the work, and that work resonates?

AI shouldn’t get an automatic pass, but it shouldn’t be an automatic stain either. The tool’s presence matters less than the person handling it.

If you use AI to assist your work in any way, it’s always a good idea to know what bad AI writing looks like and how you can use it to your advantage. I’ve built a small tool to help with that. Thank you for reading.