I am traveling at the moment so can’t do my weekly Publishing News, Book Marketing, and Writing Craft roundup. I started the blog to learn about publishing nearly eighteen years ago, and in the spirit of always learning I’ve written some articles on important topics for a writer to consider. These are my thoughts. It is not legal advice. Hopefully, I can shed some light on the subject of Artificial Intelligence.
Last week I mentioned the Anthropic AI court case and the claims we have to prepare on behalf of the Literary Estate we are responsible for.
This week I want to talk about the tricky path we are all traveling with Artificial Intelligence.
Since I started writing about Artificial Intelligence in my weekly blog in early 2024, the specter of doom has been trading places with the angel of progress on my shoulder almost every week. I have tried to be as balanced as I can be in my weekly roundup.
All of us in publishing land have an up close and personal reaction to Artificial Intelligence, because our work was stolen to train it.
Compensation for the stealing/pirating of our work is the basis of the Anthropic court case and the cases going through the courts now. The judge in the Anthropic case deemed that if the AI was trained on a book written by Author B, so long as Anthropic had bought a copy of the book, and Author B had been paid for it, then training an AI could be seen as fair use.
When that judgement was handed down, there was a lot of soul searching among AI companies. Those that copied Anthropic know what is coming - potentially billions of dollars in claims against them for stealing pirated copyrights to train their Large Learning Models.
Some AI companies immediately started to do deals with publishers, who were happy to provide access to their backlists. Publishers weren’t doing anything much with their backlist and they could earn a tidy sum from an AI training license. They could pass on some money to their authors who opted in to the license. HarperCollins was the first big publisher to publicly say they would do this. The others are quietly non-committal.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
I asked an AI and it said AI means creating computer systems that can think, learn, and make decisions in ways that feel human, learning from data to spot patterns.
In other words, the more data you throw at the computer system the better it is able to spot patterns and replicate them to think, and learn, and make decisions as if it were a human.
Using an AI should not replace your own due diligence on research, because you can’t quite trust it to give you truthful advice. It is a machine. It can only respond to the prompt data you give it. Which is why the more you refine the prompt the more useful the answer you get back. If you ask an AI for ten problems in growing a plant, the AI will fixate on the number ten, give you three real problems and make up seven more. And you don’t know what is true or not.
As everybody begins to see the flaws in these models the AI companies are scrambling to find better research training data. Microsoft has launched a Publishers Content Marketplace specifically aimed at acquiring quick churn news stories so that AI search can improve and be seen as more responsive and reliable.
The AI that is altering the publishing world is Generative AI. That is an AI that can generate new content based on the data it was trained on. (Where those court cases come in.) This could be ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Midjourney, Sora video generator, and others springing up like weeds.
We see generative AI in almost everything online, our email, our editing software, grammar, search, assistants on our smart watches, fitness programmes, etc. As soon as you start writing up pops the spell checkers, grammar checkers, manuscript assessors, instant sentence endings in your email etc. All this using some form of machine learning.
How do we hold the moral high ground when we are using it, unwittingly in some cases, every time we log onto our computer? Trusted industry voices are saying how easy it is to use AI for all those really hard thinking jobs. Should we….
Use AI to brainstorm ideas.
Use AI to write your manuscript.
Use AI to write your synopsis.
Use AI to write your blurb and marketing material.
Use AI to create your covers.
These are the real questions for authors and publishers. How do we reconcile
the productivity short cuts that using AI brings against the way it was trained to help us.
It leaves the authors feeling icky every time we use Chat GPT. If we look to publishers for advice they have been adamant that they do not want any work submitted that used AI in the creation. However, over the last year, all the bookfairs are holding seminars for publishers on how to use AI in their business. Bit of a conundrum there.
The discussions about AI use in a creative context have become quite heated. With extreme positions at both ends of the spectrum becoming a moral yardstick to beat people over the head with. Either reject everything and be called a luddite or embrace everything and be pilloried for stealing others work. The average writer is trying to find a middle path through the minefield of opinion, when the technology is rapidly changing the written landscape. This is where the author and the publisher need to have some clear guidelines.
In the last six months there have been various calls for some sort of licensing of AI content. The Authors Guild last year promoted their Human Authored certification logo which members can use if they register their work with the guild. Author societies around the world are looking at similar ideas. Media companies are making statements about their use of Artificial Intelligence on their websites
Recently Dave Malone wrote on Jane Friedman’s blog about a proposed AI attribution and creative content license which he called a transparent framework for creators to use. Long time blogger and futurist in the publishing space, Joanna Penn, puts a sticker on her audiobooks that use AI voices. She has cloned her voice with Eleven Labs technology for narration. It’s an AI voice but she owns it because it is her voice.
AI and the law.
The European Union is putting laws in place to regulate AI use. From August 2026 you must label all work that used AI generated content and is displayed in the European Union. They are particularly concerned with deep fake videos, AI made images, and AI generated information that has not been signed off by a human. The fines are 15 million Euros or 3% of your worldwide earnings, whichever is greater. If the information has been vetted by a human and found to be misleading, then expect fines. Other countries are working their way through guidelines about AI use and abuse. Expect laws to change in the next few years following the EU’s lead.
Fake or Human
There is a backlash amongst the younger population who see AI as being fake. They call it out when they see it. The emphasis is on being real and creating real and in person events in all the spaces that young people are in.
For writers that could be interacting with their fans and showing them that they are human. Most marketers are pushing some sort of engagement in a real context as being important for writers and publishers in the age of Fakes and AI. Book influencers and their engaging in person videos are taking the place of the critical review. Those writers who have carefully cultivated their fan base are seen as genuine. Just look at Taylor Swift and how she can rally her fans for a cause.
Not every writer can be like Taylor Swift. Not every writer wants to be on a video. We are selling our stories not our souls. Joanna Penn’s says being a writer now is to ‘double down on being human.’ To somehow forge a connection with your readers whether that’s audio Q and A’s, crafting a fan competition in the real world, we must look for connection opportunities that are human centered.
Is there an ethical way to use AI?
Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence is not going away. It is disruptive technology, like the invention of the internet. As publishers license their back lists and with the first court judgement in favour of using copyright works to train it, we are going to have to live with it. AI is a tool, like a very smart dictionary. It can be the productivity hack you need. We just need to figure out our ethical guidelines in using it.
If you train the AI on your own work, you can use it to help you with blurbs, marketing copy and brain storming. Where I think authors could be on shaky ground is if you use AI to do the bulk of the writing for you. Your voice and your unique way of fashioning a sentence, explaining a concept or writing dialogue sets you apart from other writers. The machine recreates and smooths sentences to a uniformity. The messy take, the choice of words, the colour of the human life lived and expressed is what separates our writing from the machine.
Training up your own AI assistant is possible now. You can upload your own files and set strict limits for the assistant to only work on your own work. Google Notebook LM is free to use in this way, or you can investigate paid plans with your preferred AI tool. Each one seems to specialise in a different facet of language.
I would hesitate to use images generated by AI for covers. Already we have books being ruled ineligible in awards for AI images in covers. It is better to steer clear of using them for anything other than brainstorming. Translation is the next change coming with books being converted by AI into other languages. Again, I wonder if the translation will use the right words to keep the flavour of your style of writing.
Chelle Honniker has been doing excellent work around AI automations for authors and her recent article on time saving coding was revelatory. This is where training your own AI author assistant really makes a difference in your business.
What is coming and how we need to prepare for it.
Search is changing. AI is looking for trusted information so marketing your books can be as easy as writing some blog posts on who needs to read your books, the tropes, how you came to write it and making sure there are buy buttons everywhere.
ChatGPT now have partnerships with Spotify and Etsy. You can search for a product or book within ChatGPT which can then buy it and arrange for it to be shipped to you. This technology is already available in Alexa as an AI assistant in the Amazon ecosystem. However, the future of AI assistants is to surf the whole internet at your command. Your own AI personal assistant could be the office secretary, researcher, part time collaborator and office supply buyer. This is the job junior publishing professionals hold in publishing houses and that could be a problem as publishing houses outsource to AI these inhouse jobs. The training grounds for publishing professionals is being outsourced to AI.
I see this happening in my own family, the scarcity of jobs for new publishing graduates who used to do this work for publishers. They were doing the marketing campaigns, writing blurbs and copyediting. These jobs are changing or disappearing as publishers start using AI. There could be a real skills gap coming in publishing houses. As the laws around AI use are changing, publishers need to think about the ways their staff provide a human oversight on what AI produces.
As countries grapple with AI usage laws publishers and authors need to have a voice in how our industry is changing. We need to be involved in shaping these laws and making clear guidelines for AI use in creative work. If you have a voice in your own country let it be heard so that creativity is protected from the rise of the uncreative machine.
If you want to read more about what is possible. Read Joanna Penn on the AI Assisted Artisan Author. Check out Chelle Honnikers Author Automations blog. Keep an open enquiring mind. We are at the start of the science fiction future we read about as children, now where is my flying car?
Copyright Maureen Crisp 2026
@craicer
NB, I wrote every word in my messy human way. An AI fixed my spelling and helped clarify some research information.
Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.
If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.
If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.
Photo by Emanuela Picone on Unsplash
