AI and the Quantity and Usage of Creative Products: Have LLMs Boosted Creation of Valuable Books?

We are grateful to seminar participants at the NBER Winter 2026 Digitization meetings, New York University, the University of Illinois, the University of South Carolina, the 2026 IIOC, Netflix, the University of Minnesota, the Workshop for Empirical Methods in Intellectual Property, the University of Vienna, the Econometric Society Interdisciplinary Frontier Economics and AI+ML Meeting, the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, and the ZEW Mannheim ICT Conference. We thank Shane Greenstein, Ginger Jin, and Franziska Vogel for helpful comments, and we thank Pangram Labs for support with the use of their AI detection tool. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• January 28, 2026
• May 4, 2026