Has anyone published a book written by AI?

Published books written wholly or partly by AI

Books credited to a machine

The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed, published by Warner Books in 1984, is the example most often cited as the first. Its title page credits Racter, a program written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter; apart from Chamberlain's introduction, the prose and verse were generated by the program. It is short and strange rather than a novel, and scholars have since pointed out how much human work went into choosing what was printed.

1 the Road came out in 2018 from the French publisher Jean Boîte Éditions. In March 2017 the artist Ross Goodwin drove from New York to New Orleans, retracing Kerouac's On the Road, while a neural network wrote as the car moved, fed by a camera on the car, a microphone inside it, GPS and the computer's clock. The text was printed without editing, and the publisher marketed it as the first novel written by a machine.

Books written by a person with an AI

Pharmako-AI (Ignota Books, 2020) grew out of K Allado-McDowell's conversations with GPT-3 over about two weeks; the book prints the exchanges in the order they happened, with the human's contributions set apart from the machine's.

Death of an Author, a murder mystery released in May 2023 by Pushkin Industries under the pen name Aidan Marchine, was described by its publisher as 95% written by AI and 5% by the novelist Stephen Marche, who supplied the outline and the prompts. It was released as an audiobook.

Tokyo Sympathy Tower by Rie Qudan won the 170th Akutagawa Prize, Japan's best-known literary award for new writers, in January 2024. At the press conference Qudan said that about five percent of the novel came straight from ChatGPT; in the book, the narrator talks to an AI chatbot. The English translation by Jesse Kirkwood appeared in 2025 as Sympathy Tower Tokyo.

On Amazon

Within three months of ChatGPT's release, self-published e-books written with it reached the Kindle store. In February 2023 Reuters counted more than 200 Kindle e-books listing ChatGPT as an author or co-author, and noted that a full count was close to impossible, because many authors did not say they had used it and Amazon's policies did not require them to. One author it interviewed had made a 30-page illustrated children's e-book with ChatGPT in a matter of hours; it had earned him less than $100.

The same year showed the downside. In August 2023 the writer Jane Friedman found books on Amazon under her name that she said were AI-generated and not hers; they were removed after she made the case public.

Amazon then changed its rules. KDP's content guidelines now require you to declare AI-generated text, images or translations when you publish, and its help pages limit how many new titles each account can create and submit each week. What the law and those rules say today is on our page about legally publishing a book written by AI.

In the US Copyright Office

Publishing a book written by AI is one thing; owning its copyright is another. In February 2023 the US Copyright Office decided that Kristina Kashtanova owned the text of her comic Zarya of the Dawn and her selection, coordination and arrangement of its words and images, but not the images Midjourney had generated.

In 2024 the Office registered Elisa Shupe's novel AI Machinations: Tangled Webs and Typed Words, written with ChatGPT, according to reports at the time, but only for her selection, coordination and arrangement of the AI-generated text, not for the text itself. And a work that listed an AI system as its only author was refused outright: the courts upheld that refusal in Thaler v. Perlmutter, and the Supreme Court declined to take the case on 2 March 2026.

What the examples show

• Publishing a book written by AI has never been the obstacle. A publisher, or Amazon, will print it.
• The human part decides copyright. Every registration above protected what a person wrote, chose or arranged, not what the machine generated.
• Disclosure is now part of the deal. Amazon asks for it when you publish.
• The best-known examples were partly human: a novelist's outline and prompts, an author who wrote 95 percent herself, a writer's half of a conversation. Whether a book reads well is still decided by the reader.

Where Write Book fits

Write Book writes a whole novel, 100 to 400 printed pages, from a short description you give it, in any of 16 languages, then gives you a PDF for Amazon KDP and an EPUB, or a printed paperback shipped to Israel, the US or Europe. You approve the plot before the chapters are written and can edit every line. It is invented prose built on your story, and it is not on this list: none of our customers' books is named here, and we make no claim that any of them is famous. You can read a complete 168-page English book written by the system in our store, and the first chapter of your own first book is free.

How this page was checked

Each example was checked on 31 October 2026 against a publisher's own page or catalogue listing, a US Copyright Office or court record, or the original news report: Reuters (21 February 2023) for the Kindle count, Pushkin Industries' announcement for Death of an Author, the US Copyright Office's letter of 21 February 2023 for Zarya of the Dawn, the Supreme Court docket 25-449 for Thaler, and the author's own statements, reported by nippon.com and the Japan Times, for Tokyo Sympathy Tower. Claims we could not check, such as sales figures or current counts of AI books on Amazon, are left out.

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