| Artificial Intelligence feels like an inescapable leech attached to every facet of human life, with its grasp growing stronger and stronger by the day. If it isn’t in the commercials we see, it’s used for garbage content saturating social media for clicks and the art we consume. AI is even part of a new initiative from rarely seen First Lady Melania Trump. But the “hot new tool” that will supposedly streamline our existence and fast-track every job is quickly proving to blur the lines between what is real and fake.
Despite its tendency to muddy the waters of reality, AI is still being embraced in several business sectors, including an industry where human creativity and originality should be valued above all else: books.
Ellie Blackwood, a popular book content creator, warned her followers in an essay posted to her website about a suspiciously jerky video depicting what appears to be an AI-generated woman pretending to be the author of several books. The alleged “author,” who goes by the name Ava Wilde, has posted several strange videos to her TikTok account @avawildewrites, many of which have Wilde’s AI likeness edited into real-life clips of podcasts and even “Tonight Show” appearances.
As a viewer, it’s uncanny, odd, and leads you to question the creator’s intent, which, if you scroll on Wilde’s TikTok just a few moments longer, you’ll learn is most likely to shill her generic-looking romance novels, available for purchase on Amazon.
Blackwood pointed out that no author owes readers their real name, face or identity, and that there’s a long history of authors remaining completely anonymous online or taking up pseudonyms. But for Blackwood, Wilde is no Samuel Clemmons.
“At the bare minimum, if authors and publishers are going to post an AI-generated video of any kind — whether it’s an Ava Wilde-style intro video of the 'author,’ an aesthetic video, or a representation of a book character — it should be clearly marked as such,” Blackwood wrote in an email correspondence to HuffPost.
And although Wilde’s content looks to be the work of one individual and not some guerrilla marketing publicity stunt, it’s not hard to imagine how quickly these sorts of marketing ploys could be rolled out on a larger scale. This past June, a band of writers organized and wrote an open letter imploring the “big five” publishing houses to “pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines,” and to not replace “human staff” with “AI tools or degrade their positions into AI monitors.” The petition is a bold ask that’s meant to protect not just the authors themselves but anyone else involved in the making of their books.
In the letter, it’s made clear that these requests aren’t being made from a state of tech-related paranoia, but stem from actual examples and experiences authors have had while dealing with AI in publishing. One demand is that publishers not “invent ‘authors’ to promote AI-generated books,” and another is to promise only to “hire human audiobook narrators, rather than ‘narrators’ generated by AI tools that were built on stolen voices.”
Despite the thousands of signatures that the petition currently has from bestselling authors like Emily Henry, Ali Hazelwood and Karen Russell, the publishing houses, for the most part, have provided little response to the plea.
At the time of this newsletter, HuffPost received responses from two out of the five major publishing houses regarding the petition and their obligation to preserve the craft of writing for real humans only.
Susannah Lawrence, spokesperson for Simon & Schuster wrote that beyond an initial comment previously given to NPR when the news of the petition broke, “Simon & Schuster has no further comment at this time” and “We are actively engaged in protecting the intellectual property rights of our authors." Similarly, a spokesperson from Penguin Random House (PRH) responded with the following statement: “We are aware of the letter and recognize the urgency and importance of the issues surrounding generative AI in publishing.” PRH acknowledged that their “primary responsibility is to serve our authors and fiercely protect their intellectual property and copyright.”
The PRH spokesperson rounded out their statement by saying, “At the same time, as general interest publishers, we support a wide range of ideas, perspectives, and creative choices. While some authors may choose to explore AI in their creative process, others may reject it entirely. We support both positions fully—including those expressed in the letter—and remain committed to empowering our creators wherever they stand.”
Indie author, Vanessa Rasanen, has been outspoken about the use of AI for some time. Encouraging authors and readers to not only avoid AI-generated books, but to also avoid the saturation of AI art work to promote them.
In an email to HuffPost, Rasanen said that she’s also bothered by readers that “fawn over all of AI-generated art work, and readers who buy AI-generated covers.” As an indie author trying to carve out space in a field that is increasingly saturated by AI-generated books, for Rasanen it’s “frustrating,” to put it mildly.
Meredith Broussard is a data journalist and associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and a research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. As an author, Broussard spoke with HuffPost about her own battles with AI in the literary world. She claimed that her own books are being used without her permission to train generative AI systems, and even AI-generated book summaries are being sold without her permission.
While it’s difficult to get an exact number of the books presently being written by AI, either partially or in their entirety, the Authors Guild did confirm that this surge in “sham books” is like AI cliffnotes, usually uploaded and written by AI within days or sooner of a non-AI book being published. Most notably, these uploads are not financially tied to or benefiting the author that these books are piggybacking off of.
But authors shouldn’t feel completely hopeless in the struggle against AI encroaching on their industry, as Broussard mentioned in the Authors Guild lawsuit, a suit that was filed along with prominent authors like George R.R. Martin and John Grisham, against OpenAI for copyright infringement. It alleges that OpenAI engaged in “systematic theft” by uploading and using millions of copyrighted works to train its large language models (LLMs) without permission or compensation to the authors. The suit is presently still ongoing and will likely take time, something Broussard pointed out is common when it comes to new tech, but said that she’s “optimistic we’ll come to some sort of ‘agreement' where artists are going to be compensated for generative AI using their work.”
In Broussard’s ideal world, the endgame of these lawsuits and the use of artists’ work in generative AI models will look like something akin to mineral rights exchanges, in which the source material being “mined” from the internet by these generative AI companies will then have to compensate the authors.
In the meantime, with major publishing houses being somewhat silent and vague on the issue, does this mean there will be a migration of authors, even well-established ones, into smaller book presses? And if they are using AI will these smaller publishing houses grasp the importance of transparency surrounding its use with authors?
Stoney Creek Publishing is an indie publishing house based in the Texas Hill Country that presently does not publish any AI authors, but is open to AI use. Loren Steffy, the founder and publisher at Stoney Creek Publishing, replied in an email that he doesn’t believe in “running from new technology, and AI is a potentially useful tool.” But he also added he’s cautious of the new tech.
“In my experience, new tech usually creates more work in equal or greater volume to what it saves. And it should never infringe on the joy of writing and reading,” Steffy said.
In addition to joy, writing and reading are vital for sharing and understanding the human experience and all the complex emotions and circumstances therein — things that artificial intelligence can never truly understand, so why should it be allowed to participate in its creation, or replication for that matter?
When Broussard was asked how writers accused of using AI on platforms like TikTok should handle these claims, Broussard replied, “I think when people are accusing each other of using AI in writing, what they’re really doing is accusing each other of poor writing. Because AI writing is profoundly mediocre.”
This story was written exclusively for HuffPost Books by newsletter contributor Emily Southard-Bond.
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