AI use in publishing

I’m rather surprised to find that Wired is the magazine which takes such a knee-jerk anti-AI line. In a piece by Adam Morgan, entitled, Book Publishers Are Quietly Using More AI. Staff Are Revolting (link via LitHub) they reveal that “behind the scenes, at least three of the Big Five US book publishers—HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette —have been quietly incorporating AI tools into their publishing processes without public disclosures or author consent.”* Author consent?! Did we fail to consult our authors when we moved from typewriters to Macs? When we changed our banker from Irving Trust to Chase? When we changed the central heating system from oil to gas? You bet we did. It’s none of their business. You’ve got to be pretty self-righteously worked up to think it scandalous that “publishers are now using LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT to email literary agents, write publicity and back-cover copy, design cover art, and generate marketing materials”. They’d be irresponsible…