Earlier this month, I reported for Wired that workers at three of the Big Five US book publishers (HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster) had begun using AI tools at the behest of their executives.
Since then, I’ve heard from staff at the other two Big Five publishers (Macmillan and Penguin Random House) that they, too, have been encouraged to use AI tools at work.
My new follow-up story at Wired covers the birth and death of a proprietary LLM called NOA (“No Ordinary Assistant”) at Macmillan, as well as ChatGPT Enterprise use at Penguin Random House (surprising considering its German division is currently suing OpenAI).
While author responses wound up a bit buried at the bottom of the story, their recent experiences are arguably the most surprising (and depressing) part, including AI-hallucinated quotes from their books in marketing copy and the impossibility of getting a Big Five contract that promises not to use AI at all these days.
“We’re seeing editors not reading the material at all and using Claude to create marketing language that barely has any relation to the book,” one author told me. Other authors and agents say they’ve been asked by editors to write their own plans for revisions “because the editors don’t have time to do it themselves.”
As a result, some bestselling authors say they’re considering publishing future books on their own, since they’ve already amassed a huge volume of readers and may no longer need a traditional publisher to pay for printing, marketing, and selling.
“What are authors even doing with traditional publishers anymore if they’re going to outsource everything to a machine?” one bestselling author told me. “Why can't an author do that themselves?”
Meanwhile, some industry insiders have pushed back against the idea that publishers have been incorporating AI into their workflows “quietly.” In Publishers Lunch, Katy Hershberger wrote that the first Wired story “uses the lazy journalistic trope that this is happening ‘quietly,’ as if hidden, because the reporter did not know about it previously.” At Book Riot, Rebecca Schinsky noted “just because you didn’t know about it doesn’t mean it’s quiet.”
While it is indeed old news that book publishing C-suites are embracing AI (thanks to public statements and valuable reporting by outlets like Publishers Lunch), the staffers and authors I spoke with said they wanted to share their concerns precisely because specific use cases (e.g., emails to literary agents and publicity copy) had not been publicly disclosed by their publishers.
“The bare minimum we’re asking for is disclosure,” one bestselling author told me.
Thanks, as always, for reading.