#publishing-industry

#publishing-industry

The single biggest threat to the livelihood of authors and, by extension, to our culture, is not short attention spans. It is AI. The UK publishing industry worth more than 11bn, part of the 126bn that our creative industries generate for the British economy has sat by while big tech has swept copyrighted material from the internet in order to train their models.

In this story, Alice Law studies at Cambridge under the tutelage of Professor Jacob Grimes, who is widely regarded as the greatest magician in the world. He's also a trailblazing scholar. Grimes is known for his harsh, abusive nature but Alice has happily put up with his antics, volatile personality, and even bullying because she knows that her considerable talents and dedication will only take her so far

There are no guilty pleasures in childhood. It is only as an adult that I feel a certain sheepishness when recalling one of my favorite picture books, "Ann Likes Red," by Dorothy Z. Seymour, which was originally published in 1965. Wedged between the vaunted volumes of Gorey and Scarry, "Ann Likes Red" stuck out both literally, for its squat stature, and literarily, for its hazy lesson in self-assertion.

Publishers are drafting a new role: the AI negotiator. This person sits at the intersection of legal risk, platform power, and content value.

British comedian Rhys James announced that ahead of the release of his memoir, he found a plethora of AI versions circulating on Amazon.

"The writing that AI produces feels cheap because it is cheap. It feels simple because it is simple to produce. That is the whole point."

The AI industry's quest for high-quality training data has led companies like Anthropic to explore controversial practices in acquiring books for their models.

You can now say you're a bestselling author if you crack the Top 10 in Amazon's 'Bicycle Repair for Little People' category.

Nearly half of publishers have experienced an increase in referral traffic from social media platforms, indicating a growing positive relationship between publishers and these platforms.

Google is now testing summarizing stories in Google Discover with generative AI, raising concerns among publishers about reduced clicks.

"I believe the insistence on blurbs has become incredibly damaging to what should be our industry's ultimate goal: producing books of the highest possible quality," Manning wrote.

"The Chicago Sun-Times obviously gets ChatGPT to write a 'summer reads' feature almost entirely made up of real authors but completely fake books. What are we coming to?"