AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry into Utter Chaos

Shortly after scoring a multimillion-dollar book deal for a debut author, the novelist’s agents pulled the plug. They could no longer support the project, they said, because they couldn’t verify that the book had been wholly written by their client.

“This raises so many questions about authorship and what AI means for this industry,” the agency, Europa Content, told the publishers in a July letter after allegations of AI use swirled around “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body,” a crime novel by Jerry Falade. “But those are questions for another day.”

Yet with a new AI scandal engulfing publishing seemingly every month, it’s become more difficult to punt questions about its impact into some distant future. The spectacular implosions of big book deals over suspected AI use—and fears about who might be next—are forcing a reckoning over the nature of authorship, the relationship between writers and publishers and the industry’s long-term survival. But nobody can seem to agree who exactly is responsible for solving this problem, or even how much a problem it actually is.

Last year, 70 authors including Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen signed an open letter to publishers voicing concerns about generative AI and asking them to make “a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines.” Yet the Big Five—Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan—have largely been reluctant to make sweeping pronouncements about a technology that is both potentially lucrative and increasingly ubiquitous. (Many of them are also involved in lawsuits against tech companies for training their models on copyrighted books.)