{"id":626777,"date":"2026-10-10T22:38:07","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T22:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/626777\/"},"modified":"2026-10-10T22:38:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T22:38:07","slug":"as-they-supposedly-battle-ai-slop-major-publishers-reportedly-cover-their-books-in-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/626777\/","title":{"rendered":"As They Supposedly Battle AI Slop, Major Publishers Reportedly Cover Their Books in It"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the 21st century publishing world, I can tell you from experience that even before LLMs, book authors who didn\u2019t step in and do things themselves\u2014or hire a freelancer with part of their advance\u2014could often end up seeing surprisingly little effort go into things like design and publicity copy. But a new, anonymously-sourced report from Wired<\/a> suggests AI is taking things from bad to worse.<\/p>\n

Wired talked to \u201cmore than two dozen\u201d anonymous publishing industry employees, and found that three of the big five publishers are allegedly using AI and failing to notify the authors, let alone the public.<\/p>\n

In part, this is publicity-related. Publishers are reportedly generating PR material and cover copy with tools like ChatGPT and Claude. They\u2019re also, according to Wired\u2019s sources, using image generators to create cover art.<\/p>\n

This comes at a time when AI and books seem like forces arrayed against one another. The big five publishers jointly filed a lawsuit in May<\/a> against Meta, alleging copyright infringement. Meanwhile, used booksellers are seeing their inventory snapped up by what they believe to be<\/a> AI companies looking to literally destroy books\u2014often rare ones.<\/p>\n

While that\u2019s going on, literacy is in an all-out crisis. By one measure, students are the worst they\u2019ve been at reading in 25 years<\/a>. A study on people\u2019s self-reported habits found that from 2003 to 2023<\/a>, reading for pleasure declined about 3% per year. 44% of American men in particular didn\u2019t read a book in 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But rather disturbingly, these measures of low reading and literacy coincide with good news for the publishers and their shareholders. The Association of American Publishers reports growth in revenue<\/a> of 16.1% from 2021 through the present.<\/p>\n

Indeed, there are hints that the publishing industry\u2019s AI-related woes are just a reflection of its broader, bottom-line-oriented approach across the board. For instance, in one-high-profile case earlier this year, the Macmillan imprint Minotaur Books scrapped a promising deal estimated at $2 million<\/a>\u2014following a 14-party bidding war\u2014 because there were questions as to whether the manuscript, called Call Me, I\u2019ll Hide the Body, was AI-generated. But AI didn\u2019t necessarily trigger quality concerns. To quote the entertainment industry publication Deadline<\/a>, \u201cThe problem: publishers and movie companies may not be able to register copyright and come away with a clear title chain if there are certain AI elements in the mix.\u201d<\/p>\n

So the new Wired story paints a picture of a publishing industry where executives are just generally enthused about AI\u2014allegedly exploring a wide array of uses, like expanding translation, generating promotional materials, and monitoring employee productivity. Executives also aroused suspicion that they\u2019re generating their own internal documents with AI tools.<\/p>\n

An agent says they\u2019ve started making publishers agree in advance not to run entire unpublished manuscripts through LLMs in order to generate promotional text\u2014something that had apparently become an issue. \u201cOstensibly, that was meant to protect authors from tech companies, but it also applies to the company buying and publishing the book,\u201d the anonymous agent said.<\/p>\n

Anonymous employees say their bosses are subscribing to AI tools, and holding brainstorming sessions, in which employees are tasked with finding ways to make them useful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the 21st century publishing world, I can tell you from experience that even before LLMs, book authors…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626778,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,489,111,139,69,19349,145],"class_list":["post-626777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-books","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-publishing","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}