Against AI: An Open Letter From Writers to Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, and all other publishers of America
To Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, and all other publishers of America: We are standing on a precipice. At its simplest level, our job as …
“We want our publishers to stand with us. To make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines.”
If there's money to be made by releasing books created by Counterfeit Cognizance, those publishers will take advantage of it to its fullest... Count on it.
Unless readers want street cred reading only books from publishers who observe the request. There will be a market for "authentic" publishers along with the more liberal slop-friendly ones.
Cute, but we all know the only way these writers are going to get what they want is if they part ways from their current publishers and start a coöperative.
It’s actually wild how with the just-in-time economy, it has never required less capital investment to start a business like a book publisher. And yet it seems like the only people that take advantage of it are average schmo “grindset grifters” selling junk while all of the people with the real economic power literally beg the institutions that have abused them since the very beginning of their industry to please do the right thing.
I'd take it part of the problem is that publisher is quite a "unglorious" job to say somehow. Like, it's difficult to make it look fancy or interesting enough that you'd take effort, time and resources from other things you could be doing - such as, ya know, writing the story you want to write - to have to do that.
Everyone wants to protect their money under a capitalistic system. Where were you when all of the typewriter repairmen lost their jobs? Society and technology change and evolve over time.
That's not an equivalency. From written paper to typewriters and then to computers, writing has remained a product of the author. A typewriter repair shop would transition from mechanical to electronic typewriters and potentially then to computer repair. This is because it supports an evolving technology.
An author cannot transition to becoming a machine, because they cannot author what they don't write, but a publisher can continue to publish anything that would make them money. So when human experience is boiled down to nothing more than the probabalistic order of the words written by authors who gave no consent to have their work absorbed and mutilated by an LLM, the only winner is a publishing house seeking cheaper labour than the human.