Who lives, who dies, who tells your story: Successful companies, human creativity, and AI, apparently

To quote Fahrenheit 451, “there must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house”. And yet, as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly prominent amongst human expression, whether it be art, music, or books, we may very well be living in a dystopia of our own.

Perhaps the final straw is Waterstones themselves admitting that they would stock books generated using AI, as long as they were clearly labelled as such. When massive names in the publishing industry make such a claim, publishers and writers alike struggle to remain hopeful for the future of authentic literature. Imagine walking into a Waterstones full of mechanical writing, geared to algorithms and market trends, without a hint of life in the characters or in the plots themselves. Is any part of trading human creativity for profit even remotely worth it?

AI seems to be evolving destructively, stealing creative freedom as well as necessary employment. Comments on this decision online all essentially say the same thing: the idea of AI replacing the creative spirit of humans is not something that anyone wants.

AI seems to be evolving destructively, stealing creative freedom as well as necessary employment

‘Adaptation’ to AI within creative industries has raised several discussions surrounding the ethics of this process, and to what extent this is working sensibly with changes in technology, or simply refusing any initiative of resistance.

Many areas of the publishing industry have been targeted by AI in both developing and threatening ways, considering the different approaches to using or exploiting it. Such sectors include the audiobook landscape, with the implementation of AI in text-to-voice technology assisting with the conversion of eBooks to audiobooks. Given the popularity of the medium, being often more accessible than physical books for multitaskers and on-the-go reading, the ethics of using AI in this manner are debatable. Other aspects, such as AI voices, for example, can threaten the employment of audiobook readers, especially as robotic voices are developed to sound increasingly natural.

The editorial process within the industry is an increasingly grey area, with AI endangering jobs such as proofreaders or editors, while on the other hand producing a few benefits. AI tools are becoming more prominent in plagiarism and copyright checkers, for example, which have been valued in streamlining the process of authenticating work and sources. When used responsibly, this shows that AI can be helpful in the publishing industry for easing time-consuming work, whilst not taking the human out of the editing process.

Other areas of the publishing industry are more explicitly and singularly threatened than developed by AI’s progress, such as book illustrators and translators. With the rapid development of image generation, coupled with the length of time it takes for a human being to produce high-quality art, the automation of AI has caused a steady rise in the struggle for illustrators across the industry. For translators, the issue is similar – that of automation (quick production, quick profit) over the charm and rigour of human work. When anybody can now produce, translate, and illustrate a ‘story’ (for lack of a better word) by simply typing a prompt, and, more so, have their minimal efforts sold and celebrated on shelves, it raises the question of whether the value of the raw writing process is being emptied.

Accompanying these weighted concerns, a survey from 2024 found that, among the respondents, 26% of illustrators and 36% of translators had lost employment due to generative AI. 86% of respondents overall were concerned that the use of generative AI devalues human-made creative work. It is unfortunate to say, but these statistics are not surprising. And, with the implications that the value of commerce could replace that of creativity in major companies, this anxiety is likely to only rise.

Creative minds across the industry are continuing to challenge the exploitation of human work for the growth of AI

Returning to the idea of balancing adaptation to AI with resistance to it, there is still hope for the regulation and control of AI misuse within book publishing. With the loud desire for compensation when authors’ work is used to develop generative AI, holding publishers accountable for labelling their content as AI-generated when necessary, and government guidelines for consent and honesty, creative minds across the industry are continuing to challenge the exploitation of human work for the growth of AI.

Although diluting the anxiety around AI in the publishing industry seems like a bleak task, one can only hope for a future where the work of human minds is valued above all other initiatives – above the writings of robots, the worship of algorithms, and, of course, the sacrifice of passion for profit.