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Generative AI is now forcing book publishing into a long overdue reckoning over what counts as original human work and how the tech should be ethically deployed or disclosed.
The disruptive force of artificial intelligence is engulfing the world of book publishing.
In March, publisher Hachette Book Group pulled a forthcoming horror novel after online sleuths accused the author of using generative AI to write portions of the book — a charge that the author denied, blaming, instead, an acquaintance who edited the book. Last week, author Steven Rosenbaum faced backlash after readers discovered that some citations and source material in his book “The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality” were hallucinated by chatbots or appeared to be fabricated, including quotes from Lisa Feldman Barrett, a Northeastern distinguished university professor.
Rosenbaum responded to the allegations by highlighting that he’d used “ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process,” according to a statement he gave to the New York Times. He said that he took “full responsibility” for the errors and is working to correct them in future editions of the book, the newspaper reported.
Feldman Barrett told Northeastern Global News in an email that it was “kind of ironic to be fake-quoted by an A.I. chatbot in a book that warns about the dangers of A.I.” She noted that Rosenbaum had received fake quotes from a secondary source — an A.I. chatbot — and published them “without checking them against the primary source, my book.” So, she added, “the biggest error here is human error.”
The challenge of regulating AI in publishing has also penetrated the considerably more rarefied world of literary prize culture. This month, the literary magazine Granta found itself at the center of controversy after bestowing its annual Commonwealth Short Story Prize to a story thought to be generated with the help of AI.
Some have contended that AI may actually be having its Napster moment, when the music file-sharing software upended the economics and gatekeeping structures of the music industry in the late 90s by enabling millions of users to download and distribute copyrighted songs online. The episode showcased the disruptive force of technological innovation on creative industry.
Generative AI is now forcing book publishing into a long overdue reckoning over what counts as original human work and how the tech should be ethically deployed or disclosed at all stages of the book production pipeline.
Vance Ricks, a teaching professor of philosophy and computer science at Northeastern University, said that AI’s encroachment on book publishing could affect the significance we place on reading and writing. Large language models have shown that these tools are capable of writing, or at least generating text that, he said, “isn’t connected to anything experiential or sentient.”
“So then we have to ask: what does it mean for a human to write something, and how is that different from what it means for a machine to write it?” he said.
As is longstanding practice, readers assume that the author of a published work is responsible for the words and ideas, Ricks said. That’s why there have been instances of outrage when internet sleuths uncover or authors reluctantly reveal surreptitious use of AI in the creative process, he noted.
This deception is all based on expectations of what is common practice, Ricks said.
For instance, experts point to the fact that the industry has long battled shrinking editorial resources which, combined with what a recent New York Magazine report describes as a largely honor-based approach to fact-checking and verification, leaves book publishers especially vulnerable to the risks posed by generative AI.
Without a set of best practices, the recent incidents touch on some of those anxieties, experts say, particularly as it pertains to the integrity of authorship and the ethical expectations and obligations assumed by authors and their editors.
“Everyone is scrambling to figure it out,” said Stephanie Young, an associate teaching professor of English, who is also the W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of Creative Writing. “Publishing is so decimated at the level of actual editing,” she noted.
Young, whose work focused less on mainstream publishing and more on the literary “prize economy,” suggested that the crisis is exposing deeper structural pressures on publishers and that much of the editorial burden tends to fall on overworked literary agents, who sometimes end up performing multiple rounds of substantive edits and manuscript development before a book ever reaches an acquiring editor.
Young, who believes that AI tools can serve critical and pedagogical ends, said she’s interested in how the debate over AI use in publishing speaks to durable “fantasies” about ideas of authenticity, voice and originality in writing.
“I think we have this idea of creative writing around authentic voice that’s so distinguishable, but the truth is these are all genres,” Young said, “and as humans, we’re influenced by the genres that come before us; and we write inside of those genres. So it makes a kind of sense, like a prize-winning piece of short fiction is a very identifiable genre, right?”
There are traditions that outright reject authorial control altogether, she noted, such as Surrealist “automatic writing,” so-called “found object” art and other conceptual practices dating back to the early 20th century that explore appropriation, remixing and chance.
Zoom out to the larger world of mainstream publishing, which relies more on identifiable formulae, and the boundary between “authentic” human writing and AI-assisted writing gets blurrier. Mainstream publishing has become “such a genre-driven, marketplace-driven project” that it’s already so shaped by “standardized voices” and patterns that AI can readily imitate, she said.
There may come a point, however, in which use of AI in published works is akin to the relationship of a public figure and the communications team behind that person, Ricks said.
“I’m imagining there could come a day when, as is the case with speechwriting, it’s just more widely understood that having your name associated with something just means basically you’re taking credit for it, or you’re getting the credit, but not necessarily that you did the work or the labor of organizing those thoughts and those words in that way,” Ricks said.
Until that day comes, however, authors should be able to identify and attest to what tools they used in the creative process, whether that’s other human beings, AI or a mix of both, Ricks said. Similarly, Young suggested that there ought to be more robust conversation about how
But fear of backlash may be holding some back. “If people around you don’t think they can tell you that they’re using AI systems, or how they’re using them, but they are doing so anyway, then I don’t think that’s good,” Ricks said. “You can have a preference that people not use them, or that they use them only in very limited ways or whatever, but also maybe try to ratchet down the sense that it’s the gravest moral sin that a person could possibly commit.”
One way for publishers to better detect AI in writing from their authors is simply by having better relationships with authors, Ricks said. That way, publishing houses can more readily detect writing that seems amiss. These publishers should also be open with readers about their AI policies, what they allow and how they’re vetting AI use, he said.
Given the economic realities of publishing houses, there’s also the ethical question of whether publishers would one day use AI to replace editors, Ricks said.
“There is that challenge to publishers on the whole of just what kind of oversight [we are] willing to pay for, and what kind of mentoring or guidance [we are] willing to pay for,” he said. “And if we’re not willing to do that, then I think [publishers are] going to just accept that [they’re] going to be embarrassed every so often when something like this happens.”
The use of AI in the publishing industry also brings about the question of “Why we want people to be reading books in the first place?,” Ricks said.
Reading is “a technology. It’s a form of creative expression. It’s a way of conveying information,” he said.
To that end, “I want whatever set of policies and practices is going to preserve the value of reading and the value of what we can learn from the written word,” he said.
Tanner Stening is an assistant news editor at Northeastern Global News. Email him at t.stening@northeastern.edu. Follow him on X/Twitter @tstening90.
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