What are Publishing Companies Doing About AI?

A year ago the question of what publishing companies are currently doing brought an answer of, “not much.” Not a whole lot has changed since, but there has been some activity. I’ll focus on trade book publishers; scholarly and academic publishers are more active. Here’s some of what I’ve uncovered.

Hachette: According to a November 2023 report in The Bookseller in the UK, Hachette has published a position statement on AI, offering a distinction between ‘operational’ uses and ‘creative’ uses. The company “made it clear it encourages ‘responsible experimentation’ for operational uses but is opposed to ‘machine creativity... in order to protect original creative content produced by humans’.”

HarperCollins: According to an April, 2023 report in Publishers Weekly by Andrew Albanese and Ed Nawotka, HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray said:

“We know that it’s going to be important and it’s going to have a major impact on our industry over the next three to five years. And so I think a lot of us are trying to figure out how and to make sure we employ it in an ethical, moral way that helps us serve authors and provide professional services to authors and doesn’t compete with authors and storytelling.

“And that’s, I think, a challenge. Not so much maybe for all the publishers that are here, but I guarantee you there are a lot of little tech teams around the world that might be coming after our business. They’re not publishers, they’re not editors. They’re the technologists and they see an opportunity.”

Penguin Random House (PRH): Bertelsmann, the parent company of PRH, offers a white paper called State of Play: Exploring Generative AI’s Transformative Effects on the Media & Entertainment Industry, which includes a section on book publishing.

Also, according to a report in Publishers Lunch, the company “introduced its own internal AI application, called PRH ChatGPT.”

The article states that PRH internal documents explain that the program “‘can be used to streamline processes, enhance creativity, and provide data insights’ across departments. The company suggests that among the uses of the app are summarizing books and documents; revising emails; drafting blog posts or job descriptions; analyzing text-based data, and “generat[ing] ideas for content.’”

Simon & Schuster: Company CEO Jonathan Karp earned a mention in the New York Times “Most Memorable Literary Moments of the Last 25 Years” with a quote reported in Publishers Weekly from its May 2024 U.S. Book Show. He said that AI was not the “elephant in the room” but rather, “more like the cicada in the world. You know, lots of buzzing and lots of screwing.”

He acknowledged that AI “is definitely a valuable tool. It’s definitely going to make us more efficient. It’s going to help us process and gather information better, and hopefully allow workers to do a higher level of work that’s more interesting and creative.”

In March 2024, at the London Book Fair, as reported in The Bookseller, Karp said that the company would also be looking at foreign language versions of AI-generated audiobooks “in territories where [that author’s] works would never otherwise have a chance because of the cost of [audio production].”