The new premium product: books written by people

Earlier this year, author Steven Rosenbaum took a phone call that turned his world upside down. The book he had spent three years researching and writing, he was informed, contained quotations fabricated by AI tools.

“When I learnt there were factual inaccuracies in The Future of Truth, my first reaction was: that’s impossible,” Rosenbaum tells the FT two months after the discovery. “It had gone through a traditional publishing process with multiple rounds of editing and review.”

Rosenbaum had been clear about the use of AI tools in his nonfiction book — ironically, a study of the future of truth and technology — but had used them only to research and organise material, including summarising source documents and interviews.

“What I failed to recognise was that, in some cases, it transformed those summaries into what appeared to be direct quotations,” he says. “The danger isn’t that AI writes bad prose. The danger is that it writes persuasive prose attached to facts that never existed.”

The rapid development of AI is changing the way the $140bn publishing industry commissions, edits and distributes books. Unauthorised use of copyrighted material by AI companies has also become a crucial concern. Last week, Anthropic agreed a $1.5bn settlement with authors and publishers after using over 480,000 published works to train its large language models without payment or permission.

Steven Rosenbaum, author of ‘The Future of Truth’, says the danger of AI is ‘that it writes persuasive prose attached to facts that never existed’

But it is also the deployment of the technology in the very creation of literature, and the threat that AI could replace human authors, that is worrying publishing — a business that has operated in similar ways for decades if not centuries.

The book trade is deeply split over how to handle a technology that some publishers and authors vow not to touch but which others identify as a huge opportunity that is already changing reading and listening…