AI Will Change Everything, and It Already Is

Dispatches from Publishing University and Other AI Anecdotes

After last year’s Publishing University (put on by the Independent Book Publishers Association), I came away with the message and the feeling that indie publishing was thriving. The energy in the rooms was palpable, the vibes were great. This year, I would say those vibes were still good (the IBPA is, after all, one of the most encouraging spaces I know), but the threat of AI loomed large.

The Friday keynote panel on AI and publishing confirmed a few things I know but wish I didn’t:

1. Publishers really have no recourse when it comes to our content being fed into language learning models, so the best we can hope for is to fight for licensing rights.

2. If you’re not already interacting with AI and starting to become an expert in how to use it, you’re going to be left behind.

3. AI is infiltrating everything, including in the most unwanted places, like submission assessment and writers’ writing.

I have felt a marked shift in how AI is showing up in my work life, for sure.

Notable positives:

• My team used it for a complex data-sorting project that would have taken a human hours and hours and banging of their head against a wall. AI sorted it in a matter of minutes.

• Spreadsheets! I am not a spreadsheet geek and AI can take my messy email lists and sort them into columns, preventing carpal tunnel and boring cut and pastes. Helpful!

• Publishers need a lot of supplementary materials, and AI is fast at things like comp titles, summaries, and pitch letters. It needs to be noted that this is beneficial, but to obtain these things, publishers have to feed the insatiable models with the very content that we’re trying to copyright protect. A wrinkle!

• Making art easy and fun. My social media person is able to replicate backgrounds from our books much faster than with Photoshop, and one of my authors sent me this fun meme, which made me laugh. So yes, we can and are having fun with its tools.

Brooke, the Publisher Barbie. Thanks, AI! 🤣

Notable negatives:

• A few weeks ago I got a submission to She Writes Press that made my heart sink. On page 33 , embedded right into the memoir, I read the following paragraph:

“Yes, adding the detail about those changes would provide more depth and help your readers better visualize the evolving dynamics at home. It also adds a layer of realism, showing how the family adapted while subtly reinforcing the theme of change and transition. Here’s how you might revise the paragraph with that detail included:”

Many thoughts bubbled to the surface for me. This was a sloppy mistake, obviously, but it was also plagiarism in the first degree. If we, as writers, are cutting and pasting from AI and saying it’s our own work, we are plagiarizing—the end. The guardrails are off, and this is a problem. Not to mention, the fact of this submission has made me more skeptical of everything I read.

• I’ve gotten a huge increase in the number of authors sending me terrible AI-generated covers to show me what they want or like when it comes to cover design. I fear my designers’ heads are going to explode if this trend continues. It’s obviously well-intentioned, but the impulse reminds me of how professional photographers felt when cameras showed up in phones and all of a sudden everyone’s a professional photographer. We may get to the point where AI is designing book covers, but for the time being, book designers (and me as a publisher by extension) are grappling with the very real frustration of authors sending us AI-generated images that we don’t want, don’t like, and don’t ask for.

• One of the panelists on the AI panel this weekend shared about a product that will review publishers’ submissions for them. Cue the same above-mentioned sinking-heart feeling. I have experimented plenty with AI, so I see how powerful and articulate it is; I also believe that we filter through the lens of insight, wisdom, and most importantly emotion what we read on the page. If we take emotion out of the picture entirely, which is what will happen when we start to allow AI to read and assess manuscripts, we are left with only the technicalities and what one person or system trains its AI to look for. I will stop being a publisher before I allow AI to choose what manuscripts my publishing company publishes.

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If AI wasn’t keeping me awake before, it certainly is now. I recently listened to Ezra Klein’s podcast, “The A.I. Education Shock,” about the future of education in which he poses the question of why kids will bother to effort to do X, Y, or Z if AI can do it for them. The podcast surfaced questions around how to keep kids motivated, and the consequences of removing from the equation the hard work of puzzling through something, the reward that comes from figuring things out, and the inherent accomplishment that comes from mastery. I worry about this for my kid and all kids, for sure, but I also worry about it for writers and aspiring authors.

I suggested recently to one of my authors what perhaps can become a best practice when it comes to using AI with our writing. She was using ChatGPT to improve her sentences, and showed me a series of side-by-side paragraphs—the ones she wrote followed by the ones “enhanced” by ChatGPT. (Important to note that I didn’t like ChatGPT’s suggested paragraphs better.) My advice was this: If you’re going to use AI, force yourself to type the words into your manuscript. Filter it through you, at the very least. See how it feels, and how and if you would choose different words and phrases. In other words, regenerate whatever it writes.

What other fears, insights, and suggestions do you have? I’d love to know.