Book Publishers Are Quietly Using More AI. Staff Are Revolting (www.wired.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by velma@sh.itjust.works to c/wildfeed@sh.itjust.works

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According to interviews with more than two dozen workers, all of whom spoke under the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their employment, 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, often at the direction of their executives.

At the same time, multiple editorial staffers say the widely publicized cases of authors accused of using LLMs to help write their books—like Hachette’s horror novel Shy Girl or Macmillan’s crime thriller Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body—are just the tip of the iceberg. “Every single imprint has a story of someone very esteemed who had a book canceled because of blatant AI use” without ever making the news, one editor says.

At HarperCollins senior leaders purchased Claude licenses from Anthropic months ago “but very quickly realized they didn’t know how to implement them,” according to a current employee. Dozens of junior- and senior-level staff were then “voluntold” to become “AI Champions” and were tasked with discovering use cases in monthly brainstorming sessions with staff across the company.

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[-] tangeli@piefed.social -1 points 3 weeks ago

Minimizing cost to maximize profit is the essence of capitalism. What do you want instead?

Maybe independent audit to certify if, where and how a publisher used AI/LLM in their business processes? With the auditor publishing their findings publicly?

Should it be a legislated requirement for all publishers? Or a personal choice for the purchaser?

What other solutions are there?

[-] gjoel@programming.dev 4 points 3 weeks ago

Maybe a publisher that recognizes that good quality will attract more customers than pushing out cheap crap.

But I'm not trying to come up with solutions or even defending capitalism. I'm just sad everything is turning to shit in the blink of an eye.

this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2026

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