It was recently reported by The Bookseller (UK) that some editors and publishing professionals are feeding manuscripts into AI for the purposes of summarization, without explicit permission from authors.
In response, the Authors Guild released a statement saying such use could constitute a violation of copyright or authors’ right of privacy. The statement says, “The Authors Guild calls on publishers and others in the industry to enforce strict policies with their staffs to ensure that authors give written permission before their work is uploaded into any AI and to ensure that authors’ works and personal information are not used for training.”
It then offers a clause that authors can ask the publisher to include in their contracts. I have yet to hear if agents or authors have been successful in adding such language.
Large publishers typically include a clause in contracts that allows for AI use for business operations. Publishers Marketplace reported in 2024 (sub required) that Penguin Random House added an AI clause that says, “The Author acknowledges and agrees that Publisher may use the Work in connection with AI-powered tools and technologies utilized in the normal course of Publisher’s operations, provided that Publisher will not use the Work in AI-powered tools to generate new published works in the style of the Work.”
I don’t know if that means publishers now feel free to use AI to summarize an authors’ work, or perform other editorial tasks, but I can imagine them reasonably needing and wanting that capability for internal purposes. Consumer tools available to anyone have existed for a long time now that summarize and analyze long documents. Whatever publishers’ internal policies, it will not be easy to control or even know what individual employees are doing. If publishers want to curtail unsanctioned AI use, I believe they are far better off having closed and proprietary systems that are designed for their needs and have been trained ethically.
When I attend industry events, I don’t hear traditional publishing executives boiling over with enthusiasm about AI use. They usually talk about it dispassionately, as a tool that’s helpful in specific contexts. And early career professionals are more likely to dislike AI and don’t want to use it. (See Links of Interest for an interesting survey that shows the younger you are, the more negative bias you’re likely to have toward AI.)
Either way, I find it inevitable that big publishers will use their own proprietary AI systems for all kinds of publishing tasks. Sales, marketing and publicity staff can’t read every book the publisher handles and most editors wish they had assistance. (I’m not saying they want AI assistance, only that they’re burdened.) In this current moment, where industry norms have yet to be established around AI use, I’m not confident a contract clause will in fact restrict AI use, no matter the publisher policy.
Much bigger picture, I admire this recent piece in The Economist by Ethan Mollick who points out that AI is a “weird” technology that can’t (or shouldn’t) be seen merely as a tool to do your job faster and/or produce slop. In publishing, obvious examples would be using AI to speed up marketing copy, editing, or submissions analysis, or producing bookspam.
Mollick writes that our impulse to de-weird AI “leads companies to default towards automation rather than augmentation. When leaders see studies showing productivity gains of 30 percent from AI, their instinct is to cut 30 percent of the workforce. … What is hard, and requires genuine imagination, is asking a different question: what does it mean to rebuild an organisation around the fact that a single programmer can now write a hundred times more code? What new products become possible? What new markets open up? No vendor can answer those questions for you. … A failure to see AI for what it is—a profoundly odd, risky and powerful technology—will guarantee bad ones. … You don’t navigate strange territory by pretending your old maps will work.” My thanks to Peter Brantley for sharing this article.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
