I’m an indie author. So when I open my TikTok to see a flood of posts screaming “Amazon stealing books for AI!”, I pay attention.

I sell my books on Amazon. The issue here is Kindle Unlimited. All my books are in KU. And, like many indie authors, the majority of my book income comes from Kindle Unlimited. Granted, I’m still at ‘side income’ level, we’re talking a few hundred a month, not enough to quit the day job. But still, that’s most of my book income, and it’s growing. I’m working towards a point I can quit the day job.

And it’s getting there, you know? I see the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. But that light is fuelled by Kindle Unlimited, and I harbour no delusions that I will reach ‘retire from the day job’ point without KU. So when my social feeds exploded with “Amazon is stealing books for AI without permission”, I won’t lie: I felt a flicker of panic.

But only a flicker, because here’s the thing.

That day job? Is as a copywriter and ghostwriter. I’ve been in the writing and marketing world for over a decade. I’ve been professionally adjacent to AI freakouts for years. I’ve lived through:

• “AI is stealing our jobs”
• “AI has stolen our IP”
• “AI is scraping everything we’ve ever made”
• and my personal favourite: “AI is going to replace creative thought entirely, humanity is doomed”

I already lived through the birth of ChatGPT and almost every writer and author I know flipping out because they thought their work had been stolen and used to train AI. So instead of spiralling, I did what I always do.

I stopped.

I dug.

I read the primary sources. (Yes, my academia is showing, don’t shoot me.)

And I found a far more nuanced, far less apocalyptic view of the situation. The short anser is, no, Amazon is NOT stealing books for AI. However, the truth is somewhat more frustrating in a very specific, very Amazon way.

This article is not here to defend Amazon.

It is here to replace panic with facts.

I’ve seen a lot of Indie Authors freaking out about this, particularly on TikTok, and several who have said they’re pulling their books from KU entirely. Which is a HUGE deal for most Indie Authors because, like I said, it’s the main source of sales income for most of us.

So, let’s talk about what actually happened, and what it really means.

What Triggered The Current ‘Amazon Is Stealing Our Books for AI’ Freakout?

Amazon recently rolled out a new Kindle feature called Ask This Book, alongside another feature called Story So Far.

These are AI-powered reader tools built directly into the Kindle app.

If you want the full announcement from Amazon itself, it’s here. But the short version is:

• Story So Far gives readers a short summary of what’s happened in the book up to where they’re currently reading
• Ask This Book lets readers ask questions about characters, plot points, or events they’ve already read

The reason these new features freaked everyone out is twofold. They’re AI related, and that always freaks everyone out where IP is concerned. And they were rolled out quietly, without direct notification to authors.

The first major industry outlet to flag this publicly was Publishers Lunch, and they confirmed several key facts:

• The feature exists
• It launched without author notification
• There is no opt-out for authors
• Amazon declined to fully explain how the AI works internally

Once that article circulated, social media did what social media does best.

And every Indie Author I know went into meltdown. 

And right before Christmas.

Thanks, Amazon 😮‍💨

Is Amazon Stealing Our Books And Feeding Them To AI?

Short answer:

Yes, but not in the way TikTok is making it sound.

Longer, more accurate answer:

Amazon is using AI to analyse the text of Kindle books in order to:

• Generate short summaries
• Answer reader questions about the book they are already reading

According to Amazon (via their spokesperson, quoted in Publishers Lunch), the AI:

• Produces short, factual answers
• Only references content up to the reader’s current place
• Is not shareable or copyable
• Is only accessible to people who already own or borrow the book

This is not a public chatbot.
This is not a searchable AI trained to spit out your prose to strangers.
This is an internal reader-assistance feature inside Kindle.

That distinction matters.

What Amazon Is NOT Doing (Despite The Panic)

Let’s be very clear here, because misinformation spreads fast.

Based on all available reporting and Amazon’s own statements, Amazon is NOT:

• Uploading your book to ChatGPT
• Selling your text to third-party AI companies
• Making your book publicly accessible via AI
• Allowing non-buyers to query your book
• Releasing AI-written novels trained on KU books

There is no evidence of any of the above.

What is happening is Amazon applying AI to books already licensed to them to improve the Kindle reading experience.

That doesn’t make it unproblematic, but it does make it very different from “Amazon stole our books and gave them to AI robots so ChatGPT can replace authors and ruin our lives”.

The Real Issue: Consent, Control, And Communication

Despite me wanting everyone to calm the fuck down and stop freaking out thinking Amazon is stealing their books for AI use, I’m NOT saying the chain of events here is unprblematic. There are very good reasons for authors to be completely justified in their anger of this whole fiasco. I am, myself, pretty pissed off about it, just not because I think Amazon has fed all my novels to ChatGPT. 

No. We’re right to be pissed because: 

1. Authors Were Not Asked

There was:

• No opt-in
• No opt-out
• No warning
• No dashboard notice
• No KDP email

Publishers Lunch explicitly confirmed that authors and publishers were not notified before rollout. So this isn’t a case of ‘there were options we just missed them’. Amazon has since confirmed the feature is always on and cannot be disabled by authors.

That’s the part that feels violating.

That’s the part that pissed me off.

I wasn’t given a choice. 

To be honest, now I fully understand the feature and know how it works and how my books are being used, I’d probably have chosen to opt-in had I been given the option. And that’s the infuriating part. They could have just explained it to us properly, and given us all the option.

A lot of authors, myself included, would have gone ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool, and will actually probably do wonders for my read through rates and earn me more money.”

But because we had it forced upon us, it feels dirty. It feels nasty. 

And not in a ‘that guy I’ve been lusting over on mask kink thirst traps broke into my house in his mask’ dirty. (Yes, I’m currently reading Lights Out.)

Consent is a huge deal in any context, but where our book babies are concerned what Amazon has done is taken away our autonomy, our choice, our right to decide how readers interact with our books.

And that’s really fucking shitty. Shame on you, Amazon.

Shame.

It really wasn’t necessary or needed – you could have given us the option. I’d wager a large proportion of Indie Authors would have opted-in happily, if given the choice having been fully informed.

2. Amazon Refused To Fully Explain The AI Usage

When asked directly whether the books are protected from broader AI training, Amazon declined to answer.

That silence is doing a lot of damage.

Because even I, the skeptic who takes apocalyptic freak outs over AI with a small ocean’s worth of salt, understand the implication.

Even if Amazon isn’t using these books to train future models, refusing to say so clearly invites distrust. It also implies that they don’t want to box themselves into a corner that prevents them from doing it later.

In other words, by refusing to be transparent on exactly what they’re doing with our books, they’re leaving themselves wide open to the assumption that they either:

1. Are currently stealing books for AI use, or
2. Plan to do so later and don’t want to have it on record that they stated this wasn’t happening.

And yes, that part also really fucking bothers me.

3. Authors Have No Real Leverage

This is the part a lot of commentary conveniently ignores.

For many indie authors:

• Kindle Unlimited = 60–80% of income
• Going wide often results in massive revenue loss
• Pulling books from Amazon is financially impossible

So when you see authors saying:

“I hate this, but KU pays my bills”

That’s not hypocrisy. That’s survival.

Like I said, I’m not currently in a position to just pull my books from Kindle Unlimited. I’d be losing hundreds a month in revenue that I simply wouldn’t be able to replace. I had Bane wide for a brief period in 2025. I took it off Kindle Unlimited and put it on everything for about a month, largely because I wanted to get a BookBub Featured Deal for it and going wide seemed like a good way to tip the scale in my favour.

It worked. I got the Featured Deal. I left the book wide for about a month to see what would happen after the promo ended, and the results were negligible. 

By which I mean I had a lot of people download for free, while the book was on promo, and virtually zero income from sales after that. Granted, it was a very short window. But the loss of income I had from KU reads that month was significant. Enough that I pulled Bane and immediately put it back on Kindle Unlimited, where it started generating revenue again right away.

It isn’t an over reaction for authors to say they can’t afford to take their books of KU. It’s a reality.

For most Indie Authors, it’s simple where we make the majority of our money.

Without it, we can’t afford to release our next book (because revenue pays for our editors, and cover designers, and all the myriad other launch expenses). Without Kindle Unlimited, most of us can forget about the possibility of becoming full time authors earning a decent wage. 

I’ve been at this a year and a half now, and I’m still miles away from the point I can make it the full time occupation. There are occasional breakout successes who are able to just quit the day job and do this full time sooner. But for most of us? It’s a slog. A journey. 

You feel like Hercules enduring his trials, or Odysseus facing endless obstacles but very slowly edging closer to home. 

And without Kindle Unlimited, it would be impossible for most of us. 

Which means that Amazon can do this, and not tell us, or give us a means of opting in or our, and there is honestly fuck all we can do about it.

Unless we’re willing to give up that income and kill our hopes and dreams, we’re stuck with it.

Is It Legal For Amazon To Use Our Books With AI In This Way?

The honest answer is: we don’t know yet.

Amazon is almost certainly relying on:

• The broad licence authors grant when publishing through KDP
• The argument that this is a reader enhancement, not redistribution

However, multiple publishing professionals and watchdogs have raised concerns that AI-generated summaries and explanations could be considered derivative works.

That question has not been tested in court.

So legally:

• Amazon may be within its contractual rights
• Or it may be skating on very thin ice

Expect this to be challenged. I’ll update when someone inevitably takes Amazon to court over it and we get an actual legal ruling on the situation. Currently, we just don’t know, because the question has never been put before the course and there’s no clear legal ruling on a situation like this. 

Why This All Feels Worse Than It Technically Is

Anything that makes authors feel like their IP is in danger is going to cause very big feelings. Throw AI into the mix, and even the suggestion that anyone (let alone Amazon) is stealing our books and feeding them to AI, and you have a recipe for nuclear reactions from the Indie community.

Even if the functionality itself is limited, this situation taps into a much bigger fear:

If Amazon can do this without asking, what else can they decide unilaterally?

That fear is not irrational.

Amazon:

• Controls discoverability
• Controls pricing
• Controls KU payouts
• Controls the platform most indie authors rely on

Adding AI into that ecosystem without consent feels like one more reminder of how little power creators actually have.

The Bottom Line

This is not a secret mass IP theft conspiracy.

But it is:

• Amazon applying AI to copyrighted books
• Without consent
• Without transparency
• Without opt-out
• In a market where authors have almost no alternatives

Two things can be true at once:

• The internet panic has overstated what’s happening
• Authors are right to be deeply uncomfortable with how this was handled

If you take nothing else from this article, take this:

Amazon didn’t steal our books for AI. Amazon has not fed our full novels into ChatGPT or any internal AI system they have for the purposes of training AI to write better, or creating generative content based on our work. 

But they did decide they could use our books however they wanted, told us after the fact, and have given us zero recourse to opt-out of their new system.

And that’s the part worth pushing back on.

Where I Personally Stand On The Whole Amazon AI Controversy

Is Amazon giving books to AI? Yes. But not how you think. And for the record, I have zero intention of pulling my books from KDP because of this.

Having now experimented with these features myself, I do see the value in them, both for readers and for authors. I’m not buying into the catastrophising and mass freakout. But I do understand why so many indie authors are freaking out.

And I want to be clear about this part.

Their anger is valid.

They’re just angry about the wrong thing.

For the most part, what authors are scared of hasn’t actually happened.

Our books have not been handed over to AI to be used for generative functions. They are not being used to train models to become better writers. Generative AI is not spitting out prose based on our KU books in the same way that image generation draws on real artists’ work. And the idea that this means AI will ‘replace us’ and we won’t have jobs anymore is, based on every fact currently available, absolute nonsense.

From a broader perspective, the notion that AI will ever truly replace authors and produce books that are as nuanced, creative, and deeply human as the ones we write ourselves is ridiculous.

At some point, generative AI will almost certainly reach a stage where it can produce a full novel that is:

• technically well written
• competently plotted
• structurally sound
• and reasonably well characterised

But it will never be able to produce a novel that a real reader finishes without thinking, “God, this was AI. I want the human experience.”

Even if AI advances to the point of true sentience, it will still be something fundamentally different from humanity, and from the lived human experience that real authors bring to the page.

So whenever you see a fresh AI freakout unfolding online, remember this:

As long as you are honing your craft, learning to write real, raw, human experiences with emotional depth and psychological nuance, you are not at risk of being replaced by AI.

And you never will be.

Just keep writing.

Nobody writes your books better than you.

Certainly not AI.