Book Industry Confronts Challenges of Artificial Intelligence

The publishing industry is now facing the repercussions of rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, ranging from an influx of low-quality computer-generated books saturating the market to potential copyright infringements.

Since the launch last year of ChatGPT, an easy-to-use AI chatbot that can deliver an essay on demand in seconds, there has been growing concern about the impact of generative AI across a range of industries.

There is a “deep sense of insecurity” among book industry players, said Juergen Boos, director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest book fair, where the issue was a focus last week.

They ask “what happens to the creators’ intellectual property? Who actually owns the new content? How do we bring this into value chains?” he said.

The threat is clearly visible – with the help of artificial intelligence writing programs, novice writers can produce novels in a couple of days that might have taken months or years to write.

Through Amazon’s e-book self-publishing unit, a flood of titles with ChatGPT co-authors has been offered.

Still, critics say that the works are of low quality and do not feel the threat of artificial intelligence so far.

British author Salman Rushdie told a press conference at the fair that someone recently asked an AI writing tool to produce 300 words in his style.

“And what came out was pure garbage,” said the “Midnight’s Children” writer as the audience laughed.

“Anyone who’s ever read my 300 words would know right away that it couldn’t have been written by me.”

“So far I’m not that worried,” he added during a rare public appearance after a near-fatal stabbing attack in the United States last year.

– “Still not great” –

Jennifer Becker, a German author and academic, echoed his sentiments, telling a panel discussion that the results of artificial intelligence writing fiction “are still not that great.”

“It has a lot of potential to use it — to use it collaboratively.

“But I still don’t see a point where we really hand over the writing to an AI completely independently. It wouldn’t make for an interesting book.”

However, industry players emphasize that there is more openness to handling artificial intelligence in some areas.

“It depends a bit on the genre,” said Susanne Barwick, deputy legal adviser at the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, who has discussed AI with publishers.

“Science and specialized books are already further along and have already dealt with it more.”

Those areas were “easier than the field of fiction, where I think right now people are still looking at a little bit more risk,” he added.

AI’s relationship with publishing threatens to create many legal issues, one big “gray area” being who owns the copyright to AI-generated content, said Boos, the fair’s director.

“Then you get into a real mess, and it’s a huge theme. There’s also a lot of money involved,” he said.

– Legal Clashes –

Legal skirmishes related to artificial intelligence are already underway among top writers.

Last month, Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult were among several authors who filed a class action lawsuit against ChatGPT creator OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement.

Along with the Authors Guild, an organization representing authors, they accused the California company of using their books “without permission” to train ChatGPT’s “large language models,” algorithms capable of producing human-sounding text responses to simple queries. to trial.

Translation is another tricky area, as some industry players feel that AI would lack the nuances and subtleties needed to translate complex literature into other languages.

The effort is to clarify when artificial intelligence has been involved in the production of the book.

Amazon recently issued new guidelines that require authors who want to sell books through its self-publishing service to notify the company in advance if their work contains artificial intelligence-generated material.

Some recognize the potential of AI and writing—for example, in the production of stereotypical romance novels.

This, Boos joked, could bring “a bit of relief” that “people no longer have to deal with that kind of content, it can simply be created at home on a computer.”