Artificial Intelligence and Publishing

[SteveEisenberg]

The End of Publishing as We Know It

Book publishers, especially those of nonfiction and textbooks, also told me they anticipate a massive decrease in sales, as chatbots can both summarize their books and give detailed explanations of their contents. Publishers have tried to fight back, but my conversations revealed how much the deck is stacked against them. . . The institutions that comprise our country’s free press are fighting for their survival.

Publishers have been responding in two ways. First: legal action. At least 12 lawsuits involving more than 20 publishers have been filed against AI companies. Their outcomes are far from certain, and the cases might be decided only after irreparable damage has been done.

I cannot see myself intentionally reading an AI-produced summary of a book, nonfiction or otherwise. But what if AI crafted the rewrite to be more entertaining than the original?

P.S. Apologies if I put this in the wrong area of Mobileread. The topic might be seen as slightly political, but I do not perceive a left-right divide.

[Apache]

Book and Music publishers said the same thing when downloading music and books started to become more popular. They are still around and would have had less problems if they had embraced the technology rather than fight it.
Apache

[John F]

"LLMs can hoover up data from books, judge rules"

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/...m_training_ok/

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Apache

Book and Music publishers said the same thing when downloading music and books started to become more popular. They are still around and would have had less problems if they had embraced the technology rather than fight it.
Apache

To keep this concrete, suppose that, fifteen years from now, I put this request in the latest version of ChatGPT:

“Take the most recent university press history of Mexico and, avoiding legally defined plagiarism, rewrite it in the style of Robert Caro as edited by Robert Gottlieb.”

How would this work with or without the publisher having embraced the technology?

[rjwse@aol.com]

...would have had less problems if they had embraced the technology rather than fight it.

That's it in a nutshell. I remember ('cause I'm that old) when unions in Chicago said house painters had to use a brush instead of the newly available, more efficient paint sprayers. Milton Friedman said something along the lines of "If it's jobs you want, give them spoons instead of shovels." Things are going to change and maybe very much.

[Quoth]

Except false comparisons with paint spray and mp3. Those work. LLM doesn't "work". The marketing is a lie and it relies on other people's work (being essentially stolen).

Buying a S/H or retail copy for LLM training isn't fair use. Those are for one off consumption by ordinary people, not to fuel a corporation.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Buying a S/H or retail copy for LLM training isn't fair use.

I agree that buying a single retail copy for a Large Language Model (LLM) should not be legal. But what is S/H?

[PeterT]

Second hand

[DiapDealer]

I am bored with all "AI is gonna <insert FUD/SEMANTICS/DOGMA here>" threads.

[SteveEisenberg]

DiapDealer might not agree, but this Publishers Weekly take, out today, seems to me to give some new meat for these discussions:

Judge Writes Roadmap for Authors’ Revenge

Judge Chhabria's opinion appears designed to guide future litigation by identifying "market dilution" as potentially the strongest argument against AI training. . . .

Chhabria offered a pointed example about publishing's vulnerability. "Take, for example, biographies. If a company uses copyrighted biographies to train a model, and if the model is thus capable of generating endless amounts of biographies, the market for many of the copied biographies could be severely harmed. Perhaps not the market for Robert Caro's Master of the Senate, because that book is at the top of so many people's lists of biographies to read. But you can bet that the market for lesser-known biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson will be affected."

Wondering how close AI is to doing what the judge seems to think it may be able to do, I just went to chatGPT.com and put in this request:

"Summarize the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson in approximately 100,000 words."

The response was:

To create a 100,000-word summary of Lyndon B. Johnson's life using ChatGPT canvas, you'll need to be logged in to ChatGPT. Once you're logged in, you can start collaborating on long-form writing projects like this one. Let me know when you're ready, and I can help you begin!

But when I put in:

"Summarize the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson in approximately 200,000 words."

The response was:

I’m sorry, but a 200,000‑word summary would be just as long (or longer) than many full biographies—it would far exceed practical or useful limits here.

This hints at where we are in 2025.

[zje]

TL;DR "LLMs are like music samplers instead of mp3 pirates, publishers are doomed from things other than LLMs, creativity is the loser with LLMs, it's all about the relationships between words."


First, LLMs and book are not at all like downloading and music. A better comparison would be sampling music to create new music. Imagine where the music publishers would be today if 20(?) years ago people could've lifted instrument/vocal tracks from a bunch of songs, mix them into new songs, and sell the new songs without giving any money back to the original artists? Just imagine a seamless duo of Alice Cooper & Karen Carpenter singing an Easy Listening version of "Bulls on Parade"

The copyright battles between the samplers and the music publishers were easier than the coming copyright battles between LLM producers and book publishers, the written word space is so much larger than the music space.

I'm not actually worried about the publishers, with ebooks and self-publishing getting easier their current marketing model has a limited lifespan. The danger of LLMs is their lack of creativity. They can 'fake' creativity if they have a large enough data set to come up with a response that looks creative, hence the need to consume huge amounts of creatively generated content. This is also why LLMs consuming LLM generated content is bad for the LLM, it has 0 creative content.

The judge in the copyright case of LLM vs Publishers/authors missed the point. LLMs, and their non-text base cousins, consume and store structured data, like text, in such a way as to make the structured data easier to scan and create relationships to other consumed structured data. In effect they are storing the entire, or at least most of, the content of a consumed book in a database, probably in some form of a relationship graph, and then using that data to answer questions from the public for free or for a cost.

This could be considered to be like a model of a research librarian except that the LLM is answering multiple questions at the same time. If multiple questions use the same relationship edge then this is like having multiple librarians using the same copy of the book that created that relationship. This is not yet a problem as the librarians are very fast and know exactly where in the book they need to look and can put the book back very quickly. However since a single book will generate a multitude of relationships and it's likely that for a given question if one relationship from a book is used, more than one will be used. With a large contextual memory space available, generally with more dollar cost, more of those relationships can be tracked. This leads to the idea that effectively each question that uses a relationship essentially creates a copy of the relationship in essence creating a copy of the book that generated the relationship. Since with a large consumption of texts about a board range of subjects will increase the chance that more than one text with create the same relationship. But if the LLM doesn't track how many texts contributed to the relationship that acts as a multiplier to increase the number of virtual texts are being created.

This exposes the actual value a text, or piece of structured data has to an LLM. It is not the words of the text that are important, it is the relationship between those words that is important. Want to poison an LLM, feed it a large text composed of grammatically correct sentences of random words.

[Graham44]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I am bored with all "AI is gonna <insert FUD/SEMANTICS/DOGMA here>" threads.

That's OK you don't need to read or engage on any AI threads you don't want too

It's certainly a subject that needs discussing and one that a lot of people have questions and concerns about.

I personally don't want to see the situation end up where the publishing/ ebook world is flooded with endless AI generated fluff (to put it kindly)

Look at the state of (in particular) the Amazon ebook store currently, there are plenty of good books but there is also tonnes of absolute garbage, seemingly cobbled together by people just looking to make a quick buck and not interested in writing something good. Imagine how bad it could get if people didn't even need to go to the trouble of sitting down and typing something rubbish but could just ask an AI to do it for them, Amazon users could be swamped with an avalanche of utter drivel, who would want to wade through a market saturated with AI drivel?

As District Judge Vince Chhabria said (as linked in SteveEisenberg post) -

AI-generated books, Chhabria argued, might not affect sales of works by well-known authors. But they could, he continued, "very well prevent the next Agatha Christie from getting noticed or selling enough books to keep writing."

The market could end up all the poorer for this, I personally wouldn't want to see this happen.

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by Quoth

LLM doesn't "work".

This is the vital point that many commentators are missing. I've spent some time asking ChatGPT questions to which I know the answers, and almost always it returns something that sounds convincing and plausible, but is just plain wrong (often ludicrously so).

The danger is that most people asking ChatGPT something will not know the answer (that's why they're asking), so will accept the response as truth.

[SteveEisenberg]

Here are examples to try at chatGPT.com:

Write a memoir of a heart surgeon in the style of William Manchester.

Produce a chapter on Porfirio Díaz’s regime writing in the style of Robert Caro as edited by Robert Gottlieb.

Rewrite "France in the Middle Ages," published by Wiley-Blackwell, in the style of "An Army at Dawn" by Rick Atkinson

You'll see that they limit the length of the output to try to tamp down the copyright issues and/or because I am using the free version of ChatGTP. But if you could create brief excepts and run them through over and over, maybe with a software script, it shows a problem for non-fiction publishers going forward.

As mentioned previously, there also are issues for self-publishing -- maybe worse. When I read a memoir, I want to think I am getting in touch with an actual person. If published by Random House, maybe most of the work was done by the editorial team, but it feels like there is a real person there. AI will not change that. But if self-published, and with ChatGTP even slightly improved, I would have no idea.

There never will be a shortage of good fiction, so I do not post in a thread like this about that.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Graham44

That's OK you don't need to read or engage on any AI threads you don't want too

It's certainly a subject that needs discussing and one that a lot of people have questions and concerns about.

I personally don't want to see the situation end up where the publishing/ ebook world is flooded with endless AI generated fluff (to put it kindly)

Look at the state of (in particular) the Amazon ebook store currently, there are plenty of good books but there is also tonnes of absolute garbage, seemingly cobbled together by people just looking to make a quick buck and not interested in writing something good. Imagine how bad it could get if people didn't even need to go to the trouble of sitting down and typing something rubbish but could just ask an AI to do it for them, Amazon users could be swamped with an avalanche of utter drivel, who would want to wade through a market saturated with AI drivel?

As District Judge Vince Chhabria said (as linked in SteveEisenberg post) -



The market could end up all the poorer for this, I personally wouldn't want to see this happen.

Thanks for the FUD example.