Literary agents say they have been forced to change their rules for book submissions because of the rampant use of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Several agents have updated their guidance to would-be authors, warning them that cover letters and manuscripts created using AI will be rejected.<\/p>\n
Several literary agents, who represent writers and attempt to secure them publishing deals, told the trade publication The Bookseller that they were receiving increasing numbers of submissions created with generative AI.<\/p>\n
\u2022 AI is global \u2014 and regulation is struggling to keep up<\/a><\/p>\n Antony Topping, managing director of Greene & Heaton, said that over the past year the company had seen a \u201cchange in the nature of many of our submissions\u201d.<\/p>\n The agency\u2019s website tells would-be writers that \u201ceven what might seem, to you, to be harmless and helpful AI editing tools can really flatten your writing\u201d. It adds that submissions \u201cmust be the original work of the author: submissions originated, written or edited using AI will not be accepted. This includes the use of AI in your cover letter, synopsis and proposal, as well as the manuscript.\u201d<\/p>\n Nicky Lander, an executive at the Bright Agency, said that for illustrators who were \u201csometimes not as self-assured with the written word\u201d, AI could be a useful tool.<\/p>\n She said that this was not applicable to authors, however, adding: \u201cAI can suppress an author\u2019s voice, which goes against the grain of publishing the written word in its truest form.\u201d<\/p>\n The Eve White Literary Agency also recently updated its guidance for would-be authors, stating that it was \u201cproud\u201d that all submissions to it were read by \u201cexperienced professionals without the use of AI\u201d.<\/p>\n It adds: \u201cWe do not accept covering letters or writing written using generative AI.\u201d<\/p>\n The rise in the number of writers using AI to try to secure an agent coincides with widespread concern over the \u201ctheft\u201d of copyrighted material by technology companies to feed their programs.<\/p>\n Last year Anthropic<\/a> paid \u00a31.1 billion to settle a class action lawsuit filed by writers who claimed the AI company had stolen their work to train its large language models. <\/p>\n Other tech companies, including OpenAI<\/a>, Meta<\/a> and Microsoft, are facing similar lawsuits over alleged copyright violations.<\/p>\n Organisations such as the Publishers Association have \u2014 in common with the vast majority of the creative industries \u2014 been lobbying the government to try to ensure that their copyright-protected work is not used to train AI models \u201cwithout permission or remuneration\u201d.<\/p>\n Another literary agency, Janklow & Nesbit, said in a statement to The Bookseller that there had been \u201ca noticeable uptick in the number of submissions received, many of which show discernible signs of AI use, whether in the material itself or the query letter\u201d.<\/p>\n It said that as the technology improved, it would be \u201cincreasingly difficult to determine whether AI is being used, and this is a big challenge for our industry going forward\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Literary agents say they have been forced to change their rules for book submissions because of the rampant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-443863","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}