The book publishing industry continues to work hard to self-destruct.
Everybody who writes about book publishing and particularly the harm wrought on books, writers and largely unsympathetic publishers is reeling today and writing about this, so while I’m not reeling I am writing – and slapping my forehead.
And yes, I’m being mean with that headline, because it’s not solely, or even primarily, the publishing industry trying to self-destruct. The big tech AI firms, which make generative AI possible, steal everything that isn’t nailed down, whether it’s writing or art or even something mundane that can be used to generate email.
And yes, I feel strongly about this because, last time I checked, two of my early true crime books were stolen to train AI book theft programs. “Wicked Muncie,” my co-written 2016 true crime book, and “Muncie Murder and Mayhem,” from 2018, turn up in a search of my name on the database of pirated books as provided by The Atlantic.
Without going into too much detail, in the course of this week, at least two “big” books have been withdrawn by their authors, stillborn by their publishers or otherwise fingered for having artificial intelligence elements. This can include AI writing or AI editing. A lot of people are giving the authors the benefit of the doubt and I can understand and appreciate that. Others are crediting the publishing companies for throwing a flag on the books because it’s not clear, despite their “we tested this book and our tests show it was written and/or edited with AI” claims.
Everyone from Publisher’s Marketplace to newsletters by Kathleen Schmidt (Publishing Confidential, an essential newsletter) and others have recounted the allegations and resulting controversy.
As Schmidt says, “Things can’t go on like this.”
Why do we care about this? Well, besides the fact that AI is an absolutely unnecessary tool in the creative arts, and besides the fact that data centers used to create AI products and portals are horribly destructive to the environment because they use rampant amounts of water and often run on heavy-polluting diesel generators, the fact is that the use of AI in creating art of any kind is destructive to creators, authors, artists, editors and, as much as we don’t sympathize with many of them, publishers.
As Schmidt notes, “a $2.5 million, two-book deal that was acquired by Minotaur (Macmillan) in a 14-way auction, (was) pulled by the author’s agents due to concerns about AI use in writing .”
This followed on the heels of another book and author questioned. As Schmidt reported, “Earlier this week, the author H.M. Smith was accused of using AI to write her new book, Daggermouth. In that case, Pangram returned the book as 60% AI. It is currently ranked at 73 on Amazon. Before that, Hachette canceled the book Shy Girl because Pangram returned it as 78% AI. What’s notable is that in each case, it was an individual from a media outlet feeding book files to Pangram without the authors’ permission. Welcome to the new world of “Gotcha!”
Schmidt is among those who note that programs that use AI to supposedly detect AI are highly probable to find AI where it doesn’t exist. There have been reports of long-ago-published books that, when tested by AI, come back with a false positive for the use of AI. Schmidt notes that she ran some of her newsletters through Pangram and the result was that they were 80 percent AI. And, of course, she’d written every word.
Here’s where I get to the self-destruction part. As Schmidt notes: Whether you admit it or not, there is A LOT of jealousy in the publishing world, so it wouldn’t surprise me if someone who disliked author X decided to use Pangram on their work and made the results public. This is not the publishing world I want to live in.
As Publishers Lunch/Publishers Marketplace notes, Sources tell PL that more deals are being cancelled behind the scenes following the discovery or suspicion of AI — one publisher noted that multiples imprint have had to cancel a book over this — including books that originate in the self-publishing sphere and are then picked up by Big Five publishers. This usually happens quietly and under the public radar, and is only brought to light by fans online.
There’s plenty of blame to go around here. There are apparently a ton of AI-written or AI-assisted books on Amazon. People who want to be authors but are unable to produce a book themselves or unable to hire qualified human editors to read their work – hell, just find writer friends who will edit your manuscripts and maybe pay them or repay them in kind – are causing readers to buy and read dreck and causing publishers to suspect everybody.
Before this latest AI controversy, I was going to write about another AI controversy: the abysmal practice, which became known in the wake of author Andrea Bartz’ $1.5-billion-winning class-action lawsuit against the AI company Anthropic, of Anthropic and other AI pirate companies, of buying copies of books and cutting off their spines in the process of feeding them into AI readers then shredding what’s left. (By the way, you should follow Andrea Bartz on social media. She’s become the face of authors fighting back against AI, but she’s also a great writer of thrillers.) This slice-and-dice process was allowed by a judge because once you’re bought a physical copy of a book, you can do as you want with it. Including destroying it.
So yes, Schmidt is correct. This mess can’t continue like this. It will, of course, as long as AI companies, publishing companies and some authors continue to make money. But in the meantime, the environment is suffering, authors and editors are suffering and writers whose work was stolen or must compete with AI slop are suffering.
