Editor’s note: This guest blog post is by Natasha Finnegan, Cataloging and Metadata Librarian, Nicole Kulp, Serials and Electronic Resources Librarian, Sara Wheatley, Acquisitions Specialist, and Emily Zerrenner, Research and Instructional Services Librarian, all at Salisbury University. Emily is a regular ACRLog contributor, but because this post heavily features perspectives beyond her own, we have chosen to use the ACRLog Guest account.
This is a discussion between four librarians about Large Language Model- and/or AI-generated books. It was spurred by the influx of “AI-slop” purchased unknowingly by staff.
How can you tell if a book is AI-generated? What does that even mean?
Sara: When receiving books, alarm bells start going off when a book has a specific “look” (usually the print-on-demand look & lack of author name). Next, I flip through the book, I flip through every book, regardless of AI suspicion; for books that I suspect to be AI-generated, I look to see if there is any level of references, which they tend to lack. Then I investigate the actual text and look for repetitive writing, bulleted lists, misspellings, etc. And of course, there are always the obvious AI-generated images and charts. When a book meets these criteria, I seek a second opinion, usually from our cataloger. Admittedly, sometimes I fail my perception check when it comes to AI books and they come back to me for review after some else suspects their AI status.
Natasha: From a cataloging perspective, we have already purchased the book by the time it gets in my hands. The first tip-off is usually that there is no record of the book on OCLC or very small holdings. That forces me to slow down and thoroughly examine the material in hand, rather than just checking the usual metadata to be sure I have the correct edition in hand.
Most of the time, I do copy-cataloging; when I do original cataloging it is because it is a unique item or it is self-published. The real trick to discerning if it is AI-generated versus not-the-most-polished human-created work.
For now, here are my biggest clues that something is AI-generated:
- Organization of the material
- a lot of summaries
- feels like an internet page
- bulleted lists (ah, irony)
- Source of the information – few, if any references
- AI slop imagery
Once I find enough evidence, I take it to our Acquisitions Librarian and the selector of the material, and we research the author. Key questions to answer: how often they are publishing whole books, any reviews, publisher credentials, and their other books’ ratings.
What I don’t do: I rarely read the whole book, no one has time for that! I doubt anyone has actually reviewed the material inside except perhaps to remove the AI watermarks. Hopefully, my inspection is as far as anyone has to go. I also do not run it through any AI checkers, most of them are faulty.
Emily: As a selector and as the title alludes to, I am one of the librarians who bought AI-slop. After Sara and Natasha’s investigation, the book in question came to me. I found the book on a GOBI spotlight list for student wellness in community colleges. It was listed as published under Mango Press, which didn’t immediately alert me since AI-generated slop is often self-published. I thought it would be a good addition to our student health collection. In Google Books, the publisher is listed as “Da Vinci’s Designs.” As of December 2025, there were no reviews for it on Amazon, Google Books, or Goodreads. It is in 11 libraries, according to Worldcat.
Nicole: For ebooks, the tells are hard to find. As there is no print preview for most titles, we cannot see errors or lack of references. So, we must rely on the very basic metadata our vendor provides. Some red flags may include lack of author information or that no other libraries have the material. Truthfully, we are not given enough information to tell at the purchase level. Once we click on the purchase button, there are no refunds. Something that would greatly improve our process would be a preview of all titles so that we could check for references and AI generated tables and images. Refunds would also be helpful!
Why are AI-generated books an issue? Why should we care?
Nicole: AI-generated books could be, and very likely are, full of incorrect information. One example that comes to mind is a very inaccurate diagram model of the human body. A student worker pointed this out to us last semester. It was in a textbook, albeit not one assigned in her classes. How are students supposed to learn how to help themselves and others medically if we can’t trust textbooks to contain accurate anatomy diagrams? Inaccurate information can and will cause people to harm themselves and others. Learning requires a set of facts to learn from. When you cheapen the materials with inaccurate information, how will anyone learn anything?
Sara: AI-generated books are an issue for a multitude of reasons. Chief among them is that we cannot trust the information to be accurate (how can we when it is scraping all of the, often highly inaccurate, internet). Secondly, we should not undermine real authors and researchers who put so much time and effort into their craft. It’s ridiculous that a few pushes of some keys and several seconds can create something akin to what would take a human years to do.
Natasha: Librarians have the goal of providing resources that fulfill their patrons’ information needs. We have selectors that cull through the enormous offerings of the modern world and hopefully choose things that are helpful and interesting to our users. When I am selecting art books, I want a book that has good pictures and truthful information about the artist or movement.
How can I, as a selector, trust the information inside is accurate? Because it has been created by someone who is hopefully passionate about the topic, passionate enough to correct mistakes and try to avoid errors. There are no texts that are 100% error-free, but human creators can learn.
But AI cannot do that. It cannot be passionate about anything, there is no desire to make the material as accurate as possible. There is no thinking. The quality of generative AI is based on training materials, and it puts whatever appears to fit in the output. Once the AI-generated material is over 70% correct, I think most people will consider that to be good enough — but 70% is not good enough if it’s for vital topics like medical, law, or science.
The fundamental question of whether we can trust the information is dependent on whether that formula happened to be correct. We should care, because AI doesn’t care.
Emily: To me, Generative AI is a solution to a problem we didn’t have. Librarians are in the business of trust, and how can we ask our patrons to trust us if the materials we’re buying are potentially inaccurate slop? I’m also really disappointed that GOBI would spotlight a poorly written, citationless AI-generated book on a community college list. Librarians don’t have time to check every single thing they’re buying for their collections – if it’s a community college with maybe one librarian holding down the fort, they certainly don’t. We need to hold vendors accountable for what they offer for purchase, and vendors need to hold publishers accountable. If one of those entities doesn’t, our academic standards are lowered.
What do you do if you discover that you’ve bought an AI-generated book, despite your best efforts?
Emily: Well, what I DID do was despair about it. Tell all my AI-skeptic friends. Felt like the cow in the meme we’ve chosen as the cover photo for this post. Then had Sara return the book and vowed to try to do even more digging on the books I choose to spend our taxpayer money on.
Nicole: Since ebooks are non-returnable, I would likely suppress the record from appearing in search results after reviewing it to be sure it is AI and that the information is untrustworthy. As far as damage mitigation, it is too much to go back through all the titles that we own electronically, but I would suppress as individual titles are brought to my attention. For databases, I would consider severing the relationship for lack of control over UI and/or if I encountered too much inaccurate AI content. I am also concerned that OA books are potentially more susceptible to AI publishing mills. For this, I would review the material before activating or deactivating as necessary.
Natasha: Review the book: does it serve the purpose that led me to purchase it in the first place? If no, then I will attempt to return it. If they don’t allow a return, eat the cost and throw it in the recycling. Maybe complain to everyone who will listen and get in an argument with my pro-AI partner, depends on the mood.
Sara: Attempt to return it to the vendor. If they refuse to return it, add to the AI Jail for use educating students about AI tells.
What can we do about our big vendors pushing AI-slop on us?
Emily: I mean, part of what we can do is what this post is doing. It’s unacceptable that GOBI spotlights AI-slop, or that Libby uses GenAI to run their book suggestion feature. We as their customers should tell them so. Keep the pressure on. Shame is a powerful tool (just saw that San Francisco Comic Con revoked their allowance of AI-generated art after backlash), and so is our spending power.
Sara: I have had to push back at two of our vendors (GOBI & Midwest) with varying degrees of success… (once GOBI took the book back, no questions asked, a second time GOBI took the book back but reminded me that it was technically against their return policy, and Midwest took a book back, but let me know that it was a one-time curtesy). GOBI stated in the fall that they had implemented an AI-generated tag. We struggled to find this tag and found it buried in options when doing an advanced search.
Natasha: I don’t necessarily think that big vendors are pushing AI-slop. It’s easiest for them to just sell whatever fits their particular algorithm. No humans involved means better bottom line. They certainly don’t want to add to their costs — they don’t want to add paying a human to do the boring work of checking an AI’s work (or reverse-centaur as Cory Doctorow discusses in his blog). So how to push back? Demand actual tags that work, request that vendors verify the publisher, have them provide the author’s rate of publications. That’s the least they can do, and probably the only thing worth their time. They likely don’t check the work visually when offering it to purchasers.
Nicole: We can push for greater transparency around AI incorporation and for more control over our user experience. What it will boil down to is the power of the purse. One library cancelling a database or refusing to buy from a repeat offender won’t do much, but if enough of us say no then it will squeeze out any profits they make from pushing AI. Also, we need to stop putting it on a pedestal. The higher the pedestal, the more incentive for vendors to push it.
What happens when we can’t tell anymore or there isn’t a push for transparency?
Emily: Have a little scream about it. There are feelings wrapped up in this, and that’s important to acknowledge them in order to continue pushing for what we want and what our patrons deserve. I’m also going to go back to the book Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin. As I said in my previous book round up on ACRLog, it dares us to imagine a world without these techno-utopianists pretending they are going to save us.
Sara: Stare off into the void and wonder how we got here… But really, keep calling out the authors that utilize AI, refuse to purchase and send back AI books to the distributors. And when the distributors get mad about returns, remind them that if there was some level of transparency, we wouldn’t have purchased the book, thus necessitating a return (or loss for them on items that have already been physically processed). At this point we have to hit them where it hurts, their wallets. That’s the only thing they’re going to listen to. If they stop making money on AI-slop, maybe they’ll stop producing it.
Nicole: We are going to have to fact-check academic materials at such a level that it will be pretty much impossible to simply purchase a book. We will either need to spend insane time to overcome the “ease” that AI has pushed and/or only purchase books direct from trusted authors and publishers, which also goes against everything I stand for in terms of getting information disseminated.
Natasha: We are already there, but for now we just want to catch the slop. That’s all that librarians have ever tried to do, keep the good stuff and toss the bad. Don’t waste your time, don’t become paranoid. If we can’t tell anymore, then it isn’t necessarily slop.
Why are you interested in this topic?
Natasha: I’m a creative, I write and make art and enjoy others’ efforts to make the world their own, to share their voice and emotions. It takes work to really speak in your own voice: learning from the things you like, practicing, failing, experiencing, and experimenting. I understand the urge to get a lift from technology, but when it makes choices for the creative, both the artist and the enjoyer lose the uniqueness of that effort and voice. In information science, being able to track and verify the information stream is critical to others building on our society’s discoveries. My job as an academic librarian requires me to support information literacy and thus, here I am.
Nicole: I care very deeply about making accurate and trustworthy information accessible to everyone. Now that AI has become entrenched in academics, I am genuinely frightened about the future of learning when people are too lazy to look for accurate information, or even worse, are incapable of wading through the slop to determine what is factual. By training students to rely on AI, we are missing critical steps in information literacy that will have rippling effects. AI is not a calculator or a mechanical pencil as some have compared it. It will upend all we know about thinking and learning by diminishing critical thought and generating confidence in inaccurate information. *Gestures around broadly.
Sara: Being anti-AI is the hill I will die on. There are so many reasons why AI use is bad (I won’t deny that there are good applications of AI, but there is much more bad about it and that bad far outweighs the good). Not only is it destroying the environment and our ability to think critically (or even at all), it is also taking opportunity away from individuals. AI is trained on information that a human spent years creating, then takes seconds to spit something out that is often incorrect. Half the point of doing anything is the journey to get there; any amount of effort or struggle put into anything makes the outcome that much greater. Also, I’m tired of questioning everything I see every day, my anxiety cannot take this level of paranoia.
Emily: I consider myself very AI-savvy; I’ve been AI-critical in a variety of spaces like LOEX Fall Focus and the Generative AI in Libraries conference. A lot of emotions came up when I realized that I had, indeed, bought AI-slop: defensiveness, guilt, anger, and despair, to name a few. I’m supposed to be an expert in this – how did I get tricked into buying a book that said a whole lot of nothing, lacked citations, and had horrible illustrations? I know that sounds incredibly dramatic, but as someone who has confidently said that GenAI is ruining the information landscape and making my job actively harder, it was a blow. I want to share this experience, though, so other librarians can see it’s getting easier and easier to fall into these traps.
Any final parting words?
Natasha: Most humans try to do the right thing, most people aren’t aware of the issues involved with AI, and a lot of people are struggling to make ends meet so it’s not surprising they turn to scammy methodologies of money-making. AI-slop creates mistrust of formerly reliable information-providing institutions. We can’t lose that trust, we need to verify the information coming into our libraries as best we can. Authors, publishers, and vendors need to step up their game.
Sara: I just hope that the end of the AI wasteland is coming soon; that enough people realize how harmful it is, and we can all collectively do better.
Nicole: While I am a huge fan of all the ways technology has improved our lives, I do think we are at a point where the dangers of AI are overpowering benefits. Rather than advancing technology to help increase accessibility, it seems to be a money grab and a profit maximization scheme to the detriment of us all.
Emily: Have you bought AI slop? Do you have other thoughts about the topic we didn’t hit on? Feel free to comment below.
References:
Benjamin, R. (2025). Imagination: A manifesto. W. W. Norton & Company.
Doctorow, C. (2025, December 5). Pluralistic: the reverse-centaur’s guide to criticizing AI. Retrieved January 13, 2026. https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/
McCrary, Q. D. (2026, January). Are we ghosts in the machine? AI, agency, and the future of libraries. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 52(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103181 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099133325001776?dgcid=raven_sd_via_email
PimaLib_InfoIntegrity. (2025, March 7). Did a robot write this? Tips for identifying ebooks written by AI. Pima County Public Library Blogs. Retrieved January 13, 2026. https://www.library.pima.gov/blogs/post/did-a-robot-write-this-tips-for-identifying-ebooks-written-by-ai/
SFCC Library. (2025, January 5). Misinformation and media literacy: how to spot AI-generated content. Retrieved January 13, 2026. https://libraryhelp.sfcc.edu/misinformation-literacy/spot-ai-generated-content
Images:
“AI Jail”
Wheatley, S. (2026). AI jail.
“Cow Ocean” Meme:
Claudio Travesias Necotata Mousseigne. (2016, February 12). SOLO EN NECOCHEA!!! Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/travesiasnecotataclaudio/posts/pfbid02yRuavj8V959robBfRwqrn3RnmUY8pZAZHyqPcRvudaWMXMqHcZbVzEKUV24YksEvl
Rose Johnson. (2025, November 26). This is so depressing I went and ate a whole block of cheese in protest. Facebook.com. https://www.facebook.com/groups/400135894490699/posts/1602251974279079/
treesforcities. (2025, November 18). Guys I can’t go the rest of my life asking if it’s AI or not. Threads. https://www.threads.com/@treesforcities/post/DRMPjXkgiWa/guys-i-cant-go-the-rest-of-my-life-asking-if-its-ai-or-not
“Dubious Carrot”
Carson, J. (2025). College Student Health Guide. Mango Publishing.