AI in Publishing - Some Trends

 The Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Publishing Industry: Some Trends

Recently, I've been doing some research on the publishing industry at large, because why not? I'm a writer, and it's long time I learned the intricacies of the industry that I operate in. In my research, I was surprised to learn that many different sources claim that AI is having an increasingly important role in the publishing industry, so I decided to do a little digging and figure out how that it.

I've decided to break my findings down by report, sharing some of the big highlights that seemed most important to me, and that might be helpful for you as well. In case you'd like to check any of these reports our first-hand, links are also included.

1. "People Plus Machines"

First, I want to start off by saying that the use of AI in the publishing industry isn't new. According to the 2020 Frontier Economics report for Publishers Association, "People Plus Machines", AI has been used by large UK publishers since as early as 2014, but most started adopting it in 2017. But it's still in its early days, and there's still a lot of space for development, innovation, and implementation across various publishing organizations. Many major publishers already have small internal teams in charge of AI research & implementation, and though they're using them mostly for internal needs, using AI for marketing and sales seems to be the next step.

Here are some highlights from the "People Plus Machines" report that I found interesting (and that you can also find as a Twitter thread):

• The majority of UK publishers surveyed believe that AI will play an important role in publishing in the coming years. Most large publishers surveyed were already using AI, or were in the process of going through that transformation.
  
• "The most commonly cited realised [AI] benefits include improved IP protection and risk management (for example from an improved ability to detect plagiarism), increased competitive advantage and improved strategic insight."
• The survey also found that some publishers have been using AI to create content for consumers, but it seems "unlikely that publishers will be marketing AI-generated fiction novels in the near future." Nevertheless, there's a lot of research and development happening in this area.
• It is argued that AI can help writers work more efficiently, saving them time when it comes to researching and providing them with helpful insights.
• Springer Nature was able to release an AI-generated book called Lithium-Ion Batteries: A machine-generated summary of current research in 2019, which used AI to essentially read through thousands of books on the topic and create paraphrased summaries of the contents, putting it all together into one book. 
• "...large upfront costs associated with researching and implementing AI solutions may be prohibitive for smaller publishers."
• "Almost two-thirds of publishers (and 80% of large, AI-active publishers) expect to be competing with different types of organisations in the future as a result of AI. Our evidence identified AI-tech start-ups, and established tech companies turning to publishing-related AI applications, as potential future competitors."

Though this report focused on the UK publishing industry in particular, it is interesting to imagine what the results of increased investment in AI may do to the publishing industry and how it could transform the environment. 

"The Future Impact of AI on the Publishing Industry"

Given that AI in general is a very hyped-up and often confusing subject for many people, this 2019 report by Frankfurter Book Fair and Gould Finch tries to tackle the topic from a publishing perspective. One of the biggest fears people have had about AI in publishing and discussed in this report is whether or not it would be replacing authors completely, effectively making them obsolete. This concern was also mentioned in the previous report. Fear not, however - the author's creativity and style has yet to be replicated by any AI, so it doesn't seem like that's going to be an issue.

Some highlights I found interesting in this report:

• "The technology available offers publishers access to an array of new mediums and processes to strengthen areas such marketing and analytics, as well as production and administration."
• There is an increasing number of AI-tech providers offering their services to publishers at decent prices, which in turn will result in a growth in the number of publishers that may wish to turn to AI solutions.
• AI can be present in all aspects of a publishing company's business: from the chatbots you find in their websites, to AI taking care of billing/invoicing/payments and other administrative tasks, to recommending books based on even the most obscure of readers' interests.
• A large majority of publishers do not invest in AI, despite admitting that it may have great impact on the publishing industry in the near future. Around half of these surveyed publishers don't have plans to invest in AI in the near future, however.
  
• The biggest challenge facing companies when it comes to investing in AI is financial in nature - it's very costly, with uncertain ROI. Additional challenges include finding and hiring skilled employees, training available personnel, and dealing with the general lack of competencies in this subject field among publishing industry professionals.
• Most publishers surveyed claimed that AI would greatly benefit the following departments: sales and marketing, analytics, editorial, and distribution, among some others. 

All of this, of course (and if I've understood correctly), leaves aside the importance of setting up AI so that it's doing its job correctly, which means feeding it a lot of data. The more data is provided and the more the AI is tweaked to work with various different situations, examples, and conditions, the less the margin of error.

Final Thoughts: What About Authors?

These two reports deal primarily with publishing companies and how they wield AI and are/will be impacted by it. There's not a lot of focus on the author side of things, except to state that, no, AI will not be taking your authorship from you and making writers obsolete (yet), and that it might help make things easier for you by doing all the nitty-gritty research and analytics for you in order to provide you with the best information and insights quickly and effectively. Which sounds pretty neat, it you ask me.

What I do have concerns about, however, is how easily AI could turn the literary landscape into one of commercial derivatives - more so than it already is, that is. By helping authors find out what kinds of narrative arcs are most beloved by readers, and which kinds of stories are most popular, and so on and so forth, there is a risk that reliance on AI would further stifle literary creativity and make it even harder for non-commercial authors to get their works out there. 

More importantly, it seems that large publishers would be way ahead of the curve when it comes to AI in comparison to smaller publishers and independent authors, which would give them more competitive edge. From a business perspective, that's not a bad thing. From the perspective of literature in general, well, it depends on what stories they start churning out, and whether or not they're all simple market-engineered derivatives. It might in turn create an environment where authors are forced to write within specific genres and structures in order to find success publishing traditionally. Well. Even more so than we see today, anyway. 

These are the concerns I have as an author when it comes to AI. It's not about whether or not a robot can write my story in my stead - the creativity of the human mind has yet to be modeled and I doubt it ever will. Rather, it's about whether or not AI might inadvertently change the literary landscape into an even more bland world of reproductions and mass-commercialized pieces being pushed everywhere.

But perhaps I'm being too pessimistic.