If you’ve ever wondered why there is AI slop on Libby
“It is a common enough experience. You’re scrolling through the available titles on Libby or Hoopla when a book catches your eye for all the wrong reasons. The cover art looks unmistakably AI-generated. You’ve never heard of the author, and the title reads like several promising search terms hastily smashed together.
The genre hardly matters. In nonfiction, these books appear as hastily assembled how-to guides or self-improvement manuals offering dubious expertise. In fiction, they might be formulaic romances or mysteries that resemble familiar stories with every distinctive detail of the original work carefully filed off. Or, worst of all, they are something so profoundly uncanny that you struggle to describe them as anything other than AI slop. Encountering one of these titles produces an almost inevitable question. “Why did my library buy this?””