The Carbon Footprint of AI Written Books and a Rating System For Environmental Impact

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It’s worth considering a new rating system for AI generated content such as books. According to [an article in The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/daggermouth-novel-bestseller-ai/688067/) AI written slop in the form of Daggermouth is best selling AI fiction and my first thought is that this is awful. It’s awful because AI can generate books far faster than we can read them, but it also means that we have a highly wasteful way of generating books.

If we imagine the carbon footprint of a human writer, then it’s the carbon footprint of a human being. Normal water consumption, normal food consumption. Normal travel, and more.

Now, if we consider the carbon footprint of AI written slop/drivel we’re counting huge amounts of water, fossil fuels, in theory, thousands of computers in a data centre and more. WE’re speaking about an environmental disaster for every piece of AI generated content.

That’s why we need to bring in an energy rating like we have for cars, fridges, TVs and more. We need to certify the environmental cost of AI driven books, and charge a supplement to offset their carbon footprint like we have when buying flights from Easyjet or products from Galaxus.

In an age where people cycle, walk, run, take buses and trains, to avoid using cars it makes sense for us to hold AI generated swill to account. If we’re told “Don’t eat red meat and chickens because of the environmental impact, then moving to AI generated books is an absurd lateral move because it undoes all of the steps we took to become more environmentally conscious.

In my eyes AI written slop should not be sold for a simple reason. If authors and publishers use AI to generate their books, then, with our own prompts we could get AI to write books for us, without using the middle people. We could eliminate the need for authors, and publishers. That’s why AI written content is absurd.

“Shunning authors suspected of employing AI might work if there were any way to tell for sure—which there isn’t. That shaming ritual puts the moral burden on individual authors instead of on the mammoth corporations responsible for the system in which they’re trying to eke out a livelihood” There is a simple solution to this. Real transparency.

With transparency we know, ahead of time, whether a book is written, edited, or more by humans or AI. it also gives us the opportunity to decide for ourselves whether we buy a book or not. If AI use is hidden from us then the solution is simple. We stop buying books that were written after 2023, especially by authors we are not familiar with.

It’s worth remarking that within the Atlantic article they speak of Kindle Unlimited being used to push AIGC (AI generated Crap) rather than people deliberately buying AIGC. I noticed that with Audible a lot of the “included” content was AI narrated content, rather than human read content. That was one of the encouragements I needed to take a break from being an Audible premium member.

If Kindle pushes AI slop for “free” and Audible (owned by Amazon) does the same but with narration, then Amazon is going for the long tail of mediocre content rather than the long tail of content worth paying for. The insinuation by Kindle and Amazon is that AIGC is not worth paying for.

If every AI requests uses huge amounts of water, and power, then we need to keep track of that and reflect it in book certification, with ratings from A to E where clean AI gets an A rating and hugely wasteful AI gets an E rating. I prefer to read books by human beings since I read for pleasure and AI models just run programmed.