On Generative AI and Publishing

Hot take as a creative, but I don’t fundamentally hate AI. I will, upon occasion, ask ChatGPT for advice on what to tweak in a marketing graphic. Or I’ll tell it specifically what kind of book I’m in the mood to read, and it will provide a hyper-specific recommendation. Occasionally, I use it as a tool to help with my diet to best serve my autoimmune disease.

Where I have a major problem is with generative AI. Obviously, I don’t want to read prose or poetry composed by a non-human entity—unless, of course, someone trained an Australian shepherd how to make poetry the way they’ve taught some to paint, in which case I’ll be that dog’s first customer.

I tried to get one of my dogs to pose with a paintbrush in their mouth. As you can assume since there is a stock image here, I failed.

In a bookstore last year, my husband handed me a copy of I am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks with a mouth agape look of shock. I flipped through it and got goosebumps—it is one of the most terrifying things I have ever laid eyes on. I encourage you to google it if you want to be shaken to your core. That robot does not like us. That robot is planning to take over.

This is the obvious statement: most people aren’t interested in reading a book generated solely by artificial intelligence.

...except the people who bought this book.

But AI has crept into the publishing industry like an invasive vine. It has its fingers in hidden corners I was too naive to know about. In bringing Journey Man to print, I had two instances of industry professionals wanting to use AI to assist with the job my publisher had hired them to do.

In a very early iteration of a cover for Journey Man, I noticed the Las Vegas skyline had two Stratospheres. That uncanny valley feeling crept over me, the one that suggests digital fingerprints and inhuman hands. I had to dig into the website of the designer to find: unless the author/publisher expressly opted out of the use of generative AI, they would utilize it as a tool. I am tempted to include that early cover to illustrate the off-ness of the piece, but alas, that would be a contractual violation. Utilizing AI without express consent, however? Totally fine.

The other was when a proofreader wanted to feed the entirety of my manuscript into an AI assisted text-to-voice reader, again without consent. Luckily, my publisher realized prior and decided to go with a different, trusted professional whose ideas regarding this subject more closely aligned with their (and my) own.

Here's my question. When the vast majority of authors and creatives make it clear we do not want the presence of AI anywhere in the process of bringing our art to our audiences, why do some people think it’s acceptable to feed someone else’s IP to the digital wolves?

I don’t have an answer. Only a word of advice: scour your contracts thoroughly to search for hidden clauses regarding artificial intelligence. We are in a nebulous gray area where this technology is concerned. Learn from my (almost) mistakes.