In September 2023, after a flood of machine-written books appeared on its store, Amazon updated the rules for Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), its self-publishing platform. The new guidelines drew a line between two categories. “AI-generated” content - defined by Amazon as “text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool,” even if the author edited it substantially afterward - must be disclosed to Amazon when a book is published or republished. “AI-assisted” content, where the author wrote the work themselves and used AI only for editing, refinement, or brainstorming, does not require disclosure.
The Authors Guild, which had pressed Amazon on the issue, called the change “a welcome first step” and said it was “grateful to the Amazon team for taking our concerns into account and enacting this important step toward ensuring transparency and accountability.” It also noted disappointment that the disclosure was collected internally rather than shown as a label on every book listing.
Alongside the disclosure rule, Amazon lowered the volume limits on new title creation, capping most accounts at three new titles per day, explicitly to “help protect against abuse.” The cap was a direct response to spammers using generative tools to mass-produce low-quality e-books and upload them at scale.
Why business readers should care: the KDP policy is an early template for platform-level AI governance - separate fully generated from merely assisted work, require disclosure of the former, and throttle volume to blunt automated abuse. Marketplaces facing a surge of synthetic content tend to reach for the same three levers.