How AI is Changing the Publishing Landscape

Hello, and happy Wednesday, good people of the blogosphere! Today, we’ll be talking about how AI is changing writing and publishing for thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of authors. We’ll take a peek into how writers are using AI, and we’ll discuss what changes have happened (that I know about) through the publishing industry.

That sound good? Excellent. Get comfy, turn up the heater (those of you in the Midwest, BRRRRR!), and grab a drink. Unsure how long this will be, but it’ll be nowhere near the length of the AI trial posts I’ve been doing. :)

Authors are using AI in various different ways. Some are cranking out books by having AI write the whole thing and just clicking publish, even though many publishers now demand you to disclose if AI was used to write the book. Most writers, however, are using it as a helping tool. They don’t just plug in a prompt and get a book. They’re spending hours creating an outline, characters, worlds, and other such things, and then they get a chapter at a time they have to heavily edit. Sometimes, the AI will give them a workable chapter, and sometimes, they’re forced to redo the entire thing because they forgot something.

None of these programs are cheap to use, either. Sure, GPT costs about $20 a month, but as you saw in my previous posts, it needs a ton of rewording before it’s usable. Most good programs cost you per word.

Then why use it?

Well, it makes their writing go faster, helps them past a part where they may be stuck, or gives them ideas they may not have come up with otherwise. For some writers, that’s invaluable. We all still have the same issue though: marketing. How to get a book in front of readers who may enjoy it, right?

There’s also the folks who won’t touch a book written with AI with a ten-foot pole. I think a lot of people don’t realize nearly every word processor has some kind of AI built in now. Even MS Word has the new CoPilot AI running. Avoiding AI books is becoming as difficult as avoiding the sun in SW Florida.

Now, the horrors of AI are those books simply produced 100% by AI and are published without any kind of editing done. It makes every author using the program as a tool to help them write look like a hack. Some books, you’d never know used any kind of AI unless the author tells you. Some, are obviously AI and are obviously terrible from page one. This is why samples are so important, yeah?

Along with Amazon, Ingram Spark had some AI drama not long ago, and if I remember correctly, it had something to do with them wanting to use the content of the books submitted to create audio with AI.

Well, that’s not okay. A lot of authors I know already have an audiobook company, and I imagine the Actor’s Guild had something to say about that…

Another problem I see is the AI editors. Grammarly often corrects incorrectly, and they’ve been in hot water lately because they said they’d use the text they’re editing to train their AI. That was quite a blowback, but I’m positive there are a ton of folks out there who didn’t read the fine print and are using the program without knowing. Are they still doing it? I don’t know. Check the fine print.

That’s something you should be doing anyway if you don’t want your stuff used.

I can’t see any of these things going away anytime soon, but whomever amongst the masses still chooses to 86 any kind of AI, be absolutely sure you’re checking the ToS or ToU for whatever program you use or install.

It won’t be long until AI gets enough input to output pretty convincing books, so in time, we may have no idea what was and wasn’t AI to begin with. Book covers are already generated, and a lot of those are pretty convincing, so you can pretty much count on the content inside to catch up.

There’s no way to stop it. It will happen, but you can just keep doing what you do and keep doing it as well as you can. That’s all you can do. You can boycott, but there are people who just don’t care, and there are enough of them to make a difference. Screaming in the streets and online seems to also make no difference, but as I said, you can keep doing what you do, and there are those who’ll follow you into the depths of Hell because of your choice either way—to AI or not AI.

What do you think? Can you think of any examples? Drop me a comment below.

Well, that’s all for today, folks!

Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

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