I won't bore you by telling you a story you've heard before. This isn't hand-wringing about an individual author's ethical issues—this is an examination of what brought us here.

In this episode, I talk about:

• The breakdown in the rules about AI between trad and self publishing.
• How acquisition practices, especially those of the past several years, have led us to the current situation.
• How to protect yourself (to the degree it's possible).
• What we lose in our current approach to creation and what we could have if we bothered letting ourselves envision a different world.

Welcome to the Hybrid Pub Scout podcast helping you

navigate the publishing landscape. I'm Em Einolander,

and I explore resources and services so authors can be

successful and safe as they pursue publishing.

A warning for my fellow pedants out there, I'm going to be using

large language models, llms and AI how they're being used

colloquially, which is to say almost interchangeably. I know

there are differences, and that what is being referred to as AI

in many of the cases I'm about to discuss are specifically

llms. Also, if you are imperiously anti AI, someone who

would never, ever, ever use it for anything at all. Good. I get

it. I'm mostly on your side, but please take your foot slightly

off the gas for the sake of this conversation. And if you can

tell what real life incident I'm about to fictionalize in the

most charitable way I can, please put your favorite hot

take about the author aside too, because what I want to do here

is zoom out and look at a publishing situation we're

increasingly confronting whether we want to or not we cool

good. Let's start with a visualization. Imagine you are a

writer and an outsider when it comes to the literary world. Not

that hard to imagine, probably, is it. You've got more ambition

than you have money, but you've heard there's money in self

publishing, and what writer hasn't dreamed of blowing up at

least once. Imagine you come up with an idea that you think is

pretty freaking cool. You create a plot. You create a concept of

your main character and what they're going to go through. But

like most people, you're overworked and overtired, and

let's face it, Writing is hard. Imagine that you're hearing from

all sides that AI is inevitable, and if you don't use it, you're

leaving money on the table. You're gonna get left behind.

That's probably not that hard to imagine, either, is it? Most

people you know use chat GPT, some constantly. You've heard

that some indie authors are using LLM assistance, and some

are even making big money generating entire books.

Imagine that at first you use an LLM to brainstorm. Even indie

authors who say it's wrong to use it to fully write your books

say brainstorming with them is okay. Then you start using it to

help you finish sentences when you're stuck, and then it's just

kind of a natural progression to paragraphs, then pages. The

technology makes it easy. The programs keep asking you if you

want more help, and hell, if you're going to not take it, you

justify it to yourself by saying that these are your original

ideas. And coming up with prompts is a skill on its own,

and it's not like Amazon forbids you from putting books with AI

content up there. They just ask you to check a little box and

take your word for it. I know I'm losing some of you by now,

but please stick with me a little longer.

Imagine that you feel a twinge of discomfort when you see

people get called out for using AI on Instagram or Tiktok, but

you've gotten the message that lots of readers don't really

care. They're just hungry for more content than normal writers

can keep up with on their own. They bug authors about when

they're going to put out a new book. They get bored and forget

about the ones who don't produce at a pace that suits them.

Imagine you finish your book. You're not made of money, and

more and more indie authors say that with stuff like pro writing

aid and Grammarly around you don't really need to pay for

editing anymore. Why do editors charge so much anyway? If the

software can just fix all your spelling and grammar mistakes,

sounds like a scam. Imagine you post the book and it goes viral

on Tiktok now you're making money just like you were hoping

you would sure there are a few reviews that say your book seems

like aI slop some on Goodreads and across other social media

platforms, but you let it slide, because overall, things are

going pretty well.

Now imagine another one of your biggest dreams comes true. One

of the big five publishers sees how well your book is selling

and offers you a publishing deal. You've been chosen. You're

one of the special ones. You've got what every writer wants.

Imagine the company offers you a contract and tells you they're

going to give your book a new cover, a professional edit and

marketing and sales support. You are now a known author with a

highly anticipated release, and you're surrounded by high

profile gatekeepers and influencers singing your

praises.

And imagine that.

But while you're drowning in all these accolades, a reporter at

one of the biggest publications in the world notices the AI

allegations on Goodreads and starts digging.

Then they release an article naming you and claiming your

book is written by AI.

Imagine that the internet runs with it. Some guy with an AI

detection tool runs your book through it, and the numbers are

damning. Reviewers who suspected you are now getting 1000s and

1000s of hits on their accounts and channels. What do you think

your publisher, your doting publisher, is going to do next?

Do you think they're going to come out and defend you? Do you

think they're going to ask for proof, then send that proof to

that huge publication that just outed you to clear your name?

No, you're going right under that bus, kiddo, without even a

chance to defend yourself. You're just a number on a profit

and loss statement to them. And guess what happens to that

profit and loss statement if one of the world's most read

publications, pans your book nothing that benefits you

instead, congratulations, you effed around and unfortunately

for you, you got to be the one who found out in the most high

profile way possible, you and your book are now a capsule in

tech and Media history leading up to the place where the past

the uncertain future converge, where we're on the verge of not

being able to tell what's human and what isn't anymore,

a beacon of the book publishing singularity, maybe, nah, it's

much more boring than that. So with these mixed messages about

AI. What are the rules exactly?

With self publishing, particularly on Amazon KDP, it's

a stretch to even call AI policies rules. Some self

published authors are publicly flaunting their AI generated

books, claiming they're winning the race and making six figures

by churning out more books than a human could ever write on

their own. I'll link a Reddit thread that challenges the claim

that these authors make that much money. But regardless,

people are free to post AI generated work on Amazon, and

some readers don't mind. I haven't personally talked to any

of these fiction readers who don't mind a fully AI generated

book, but there have to be a few, and the more llms train on

our work, the harder and harder it gets to tell the actual

Amazon guidelines were first posted in 2023 at the urging of

the author's guilt. In short, they make it mandatory for

authors and publishers to disclose whether text or images

in a book are AI generated. Here's what the site actually

says. We require you to inform us of AI generated content,

text, images or translations when you publish a new book or

make edits to and republish an existing book through KDP, AI

generated images include cover and interior images and artwork.

You are not required to disclose AI assisted content. We

distinguish between AI generated and AI assisted content as

follows, AI generated we define AI generated content as text

images or translations created by an AI based tool. If you use

an AI based tool to create the actual content, whether text,

images or translations, it is considered AI generated even if

you applied substantial edits afterwards.

AI assisted if you created the content yourself and used AI

based tools to edit, refine, error, check or otherwise

improve that content, whether text or images, then it is

considered AI assisted and not AI generated. Similarly, if you

used an AI based tool to brainstorm and generate ideas,

but ultimately created the text or images yourself. This is also

considered AI assisted and not AI generated. It is not

necessary to inform us of the use of such tools or processes.

How do they know when the author is uploading the book to KDP,

they check yes or no. That's it

interesting to note in the BookBub AI author survey that

came out last year, 74% of authors said they don't disclose

their AI usage to readers.

Granted, that number includes people whose work is AI

assisted. But I thought it was worth mentioning because almost

all of this is based on self disclosure. Almost all of this

is based on the honor system.

We have aI checkers, but the consensus is they're not super

reliable, or they at least wildly vary in their

reliability. There isn't a lot of trust there yet, and where

there is a lot of trust, there are also a lot of false

positives.

And a lot of tears, as llms are trained on more and more of our

human writing, it's going to get harder and harder to tell, and

the standards for what those tells are will change. Side

note, speaking of you can always tell, I'm making an effort to

never link to the trans panic stoking New York Times in my

show notes. However, the sources I am linking will eventually

take you to the site. If you don't feel like I already gave

you enough information,

the Authors Guild is trying to put together a human authored

certification. But even they don't trust AI detectors to give

accurate results, and accusing people of AI use when it isn't

true isn't a small thing, so at this point, they're stuck using

the honor system too. And man, do we live in a world of

dishonor right now. So let's talk about traditional pubs AI

stances or lack thereof. So far, traditional Publishing's

position on AI use is murky, but the big companies can't really

be said to be anti AI wholesale. Many are using it for things

like metadata and marketing copy generation, but not specifically

book content. If it weren't for the environmental concerns I

have and the way execs are overestimating how many staff

they can cut based on these capabilities, I'd be a little

more open minded about it in the way it's currently deployed,

though I still raise an eyebrow sometimes two.

But then there's that common AI booster line that really sticks

in a CEO's Craw, especially one who's hired from a different

industry than book publishing, and that is without AI adoption,

you will be left behind. Trad publishing already feels left

behind, and in many ways they are. They aren't taste makers

anymore, and they haven't been for years, some might argue,

decades. They wait for trends to surface and take off on their

own before making a move. And those trends move so fast that

the months long publishing schedule makes these people

antsy. Getting even further behind seems like a catastrophe.

In 2023

Harper Collins was the first company to make a licensing deal

with an unnamed AI company to train large language models on

their books for a little more context. News corps owns Harper

Collins, and if you're wondering why, that rings a bell, they

also own Fox News, which obviously hasn't been doing all

they've been doing for the past quarter century. For the money,

the unnamed AI company is offering a one time payment of

$5,000 per book, which gets split in half between the author

and Harper Collins. It's supposed to be a compromise,

because AI companies have already proven they're willing

to train their models on books they haven't paid for. Some

might go as far as to say stolen see the BARTs versus anthropic

settlement for now, fiction readers and authors are, on the

whole more likely to be extremely anti AI. I've referred

to the BookBub and Gotham. Ghost Writer reports on writers' use

of AI in past episodes, but the data supports the gulf between

genres. For copywriters, ghost writers, nonfiction authors and

the like. There's a lot less hesitation to use AI tools,

although actually generating text still isn't at the top of

that list for most if you read through the comments in these

studies from fiction writers, however, there is a much

stronger stance being taken for all uses. Across the board,

there's more of a I'd rather die, and this is the death knell

of art and humanity, those trends in the comments. So while

nonfiction books more precisely, self published, nonfiction books

might have more wiggle room when it comes to LLM usage with their

audiences, fiction readers are less forgiving, and I think

that's reflected on social media too, particularly Instagram

threads. So when a massive company like, say, Hachette,

takes a stand against AI use in their books, it's likely a

marketing tactic based on which way the wind is blowing. It's

certainly not an objection to the technology itself, and not

something I expect to stay rigid. Business decisions on the

part of big publishers may morph over the years, and since

traditional companies are increasingly late adopters, I'd

say we could look to self published work to see how things

are trending. But as of now, people who read traditionally

published fiction seems solidly against their books being

generated by AI, and that's what publishing companies seem to be

deferring to for now. So let's talk about what can go wrong in

this handover between self published books to when they

become traditionally published.

I used to tell authors it.

Very unlikely that their previously self published book

would be picked up by a traditional publisher. Their

book was already out, and since the author is expected to do

most of the marketing and publicity themselves, it would

be a reasonable assumption that they would have already sold all

they could. But that standard is shifting in 2024, 49 deals

handed over the rights of previously self published books

to Trad publishers last year in 2025 that number jumped to 93

it's still not a ton, but it's not nothing either. Also non

fiction writers. Before you get excited, please take note the

acquired self published books were predominantly romance and

other genre fiction titles. My first impulse regarding AI

generated fiction is to say, what's the point? Can't we enjoy

creating something for the sake of creating something?

But I've kind of answered my own question there, because we use

AI for things we don't want to do ourselves. And when I see

people letting generative AI write things for them, it tells

me that person creating the prompts didn't actually want to

write it, or at least that they'd rather be doing something

else. And that only confirms my suspicion that nobody wants to

be making LinkedIn posts because, oh, my god, the trash,

the trash when art becomes a commodity, The Joy of Creation

barely matters, but that's been true since publishing began. But

it's also true that many people who get into publishing

sincerely love literature and creativity and originality. All

you got to do is look at my backlist of interviews to know

that these people feel a level of responsibility for the

culture into which these books enter and the effects that these

books have on said culture. But a lot of the people who care

aren't the ones making the highest level calls, and they

tend to be overworked, underpaid and sometimes viewed as

expendable more than sometimes, unfortunately. So the scale

between these positions, and I'm talking about commodification

versus the purveyance of art, is increasingly out of balance. And

when books become content, and all content is competition,

profits win, it's seen as a sure thing when you pick up a self

published book that's selling. Well, there's proof of sales,

and a pricey chunk of production has already been done. In one of

the articles i'll link that directly addresses the event

that inspired this episode. AI and publishing expert Thad

McIlroy says the main reason a publisher acquires rights to a

self published book is all the online chatter and the

accompanying sales activity. The implication there being, if

someone is accused of using AI in their book online, the

acquiring editor or publisher has already seen those

accusations. Incidentally, thad's view on the recent

statement from Hachette on AI generated work is that it will

only encourage authors to lie about their AI usage, while he

leans a little more toward the this is inevitable view of llms

than I'm comfortable with. I do think that's a valid point,

especially if past behavior is an indicator of how companies

will behave in the future. If you prioritize easy to acquire

content, and you want it fast, and you're willing to gloss over

quality control and due diligence, these things are

going to fly under the radar more often, especially as the

technology advances. If the book is a product, and the prototype

has been tested already, it's easy to see as something that

can be repackaged on autopilot. The precious time that editors

are allowed to spend digging into a book is budgeted

elsewhere, and the honor system is the only thing you can rely

on to keep your professed standard. But as we've seen

recently, being found out for breaking those standards, or

even being suspected of breaking them can cost you a lot, and

this is what happens when you have to learn the rules the hard

way. When an author moves from one set of publishing

conventions to a completely different one, things will get

lost in translation. Typically, this is what agents are for.

Self published authors have leverage in a way they didn't

used to. Whereas publishers once wanted all the rights, all the

rights, audio, print, ebooks, etc, they're now more content to

just settle for print. But just because they've relaxed their

grip doesn't mean a self published author isn't at risk

when they sign. I don't really know what the agent situation

has been for these authors that have moved from self to

traditional, especially the ones over the past couple years. But

if you are a self published author and a major publishing

company tells you that you don't need an agent, proceed with

caution. A small press might have the time to dedicate to.

Educating you, checking your writing for red flags, and

helping you understand what is and isn't going to fly. But the

bigger the company you're working with, the less you can

be confident that they're looking out for you. Your editor

might be an angel, but they're not always the person making the

business decisions. They might not even be the ones reviewing

your book, an agent is there to help you navigate the rules, and

even if querying is hard, if you've already got a deal on the

table, you have a better chance of getting the help you need. So

you might as well try. They might seem like an unnecessary

middleman, but people who work at publishing companies are

swamped again. Self published books are acquired with the

assumption that production will save them money you need to

advocate for yourself or have someone to advocate for you,

even if you're worried about seeming annoying, be annoying,

somebody's got to be

but if you have indeed used generative AI and are afraid to

disclose that to a publisher. It sounds like your conscious is

already telling you what you should do. If you know the risk

you're taking, you have to be ready for it to blow up in your

face.

And normally, it irritates me to see people default to calling

everything they don't like AI, like a lot, it's tedious as

hell, and be incredibly damaging to authors, even if you can

prove that the allegations are false.

But there is a small but loud group of readers who have made

it their personal mission to interrogate authors whose work

they find suspicious. Well, not so much interrogate as make the

most sanctimonious call out posts you've ever seen in your

life. A lot of writers are hurt in the process, most of all

people who aren't doing it, and often it just makes the accuser

look like they've never read a book before. Like Buddy, we're

the ones who taught the machines how to do that, and not everyone

has a voice distinct enough to dazzle your free online AI

checker. If you're accusing someone, you need stronger

arguments than M dash use and the rule of threes, or worst of

all, having a vocabulary greater than 10,000 words. But if you're

a writer concerned about these types of accusations, I'm not

sure what else to recommend, other than keeping a record of

your draft history. Or if you're brave, you can just tell your

accusers to fuck off and see what happens, I guess, because

chances are, if someone is to the point of saying something

publicly, you're already getting left behind. And by the way,

that bit about telling them to fuck off isn't a recommendation

if you decide to do it, I take no responsibility for the

results.

If you want a comprehensive and thoughtful guide to AI and

copyright protection, I'll link to another one of Jane

Friedman's posts. She's a lot more thorough and equanimous

than I am.

To me, a lot of our conundrum around AI use comes down to a

lack of imagination. This whole cultural shift to AI is making

what we talk about and how we talk about it more homogeneous.

And I mean all of us, including people who have already

completely sworn it off, the parroting we see from llms is

throwing the slop that humans have created back in our faces.

We were churning out rapid release books before this all

started with little concern for quality. We were all mimicking

each other's marketing, speak and boss, babe, hustle culture,

talking points and conspiratorial political

rhetoric. I don't want to be too judgmental of people, including

myself, who are trying to survive the only way we can in

the world as it is, by scrapping to make money, most of the

glamor of being a starving artist is gone, if not all of it

all the same, when our language and technology centers on short

term money makers, we're surrendering to the idea that

human creation is only worth what the highest number of

people will pay for it, the inevitable result of a focus on

commodity over quality is this that books are made by machines

that whatever costs less for the corporations to produce will be

lifted up over things made by human minds that aren't the sure

thing, and until the machines start unionizing, they're going

to seem like a much better deal than paying fallible human

beings who make spelling mistakes sometimes, although by

the time the machines start unionizing, things are going to

look a lot different than they do right now, one way or

another. But many people who still love reading love it

because of its power to connect us to advance human thought and

invention. That's also, in a way, what futurists and tech

optimists are hoping would come from AI as well. And in some

cases, it does, though, not really any that have to do with

generating words, if you ask me, but focusing on what maximizes

profits in the short term risk.

Use of both books and new technologies to something that

keeps us stuck here. It makes it easier for publishing companies

to take safe bets on regurgitating words concocted by

the internet's various garbage patches. When everyone is using

generative AI to express themselves, the information

available becomes recycled until it's sucked dry as a ball of

lint. When every learning source is lumped together into a single

model, the answers you get to your questions are about as

reliable as a source free Facebook post from your aunt,

when everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Who are we

supporting in the development and preservation of new

knowledge? Who is doing the thinking and research to create

more to feed the machine. Now I'll say, Fuck generative AI and

fuck data centers all day long, in the spirit of what most

people mean when they say it. In fact, I'll wear a t shirt that

says it. I have a T shirt that says it, but what I really mean

is fuck AI in its current form. It does not have to be like

this.

The more I look into AI technology as a whole and even

language models, the more I mourn what could be. We could

have it so good. We could have data centers that integrate with

our ecosystem, instead of draining communities of their

resources and pillaging the global South, we could have

contained language models that help revive dying languages and

preserve culture and history and work in tandem with researchers.

Instead of gutting universities and sealing even more knowledge

from people who could use it for good, we could have so much more

than a place to offload our thinking and substitute for

actual human friends. More than something to write the LinkedIn

posts that we hate or give us bad advice repurposed from some

doofus on a defunct forum post, more than writing quote,

unquote, mediocre books that give us a little bit of money

and no emotional satisfaction, but those opportunities don't

come when everything is mass produced just for a consumer

market, and all the information is lumped into a single source

that poops back and forth forever. It comes from smaller,

more well curated, cared for and intentionally built systems.

Yes, this is me back on my decentralization bullshit, and

you can say there's nothing new under the sun.

But are you sure? Have you been looking? Have you tried? Have

you wondered what could happen if we stopped looking at

everything as products, and stopped looking at every new

technology as just another way to sell products and the

product, in many cases, being you,

I don't know how we get to something better, but I do know

we can't get there without wondering or without seeking it

out. And admittedly, that's less about bitching and moaning than

it is about educating ourselves, challenging structures and

conceiving of new ones.

I've got a lot of links and sources in the essay version of

this podcast on my website, hybridpubscout.com, and some of

them are also in the show notes on your favorite podcast

platform. Also, there are a couple books I've added to the

HPS bookshop.org, shop, Empire of AI by Karen Hao and the AI

con by Professor Emily M Bender and Dr Alex Hanna. And yes, they

are affiliate links. I get a little kickback. So far, I've

only read the first one, but I've ordered the second, and

Professor Bender is one of the authors of the famous paper on

the dangers of stochastic parrots that Google tried to

suppress when it was first published, because it brought up

all of these issues that make AI in its current form as untenable

as it is now, if you have thoughts, you can email me

emily@hybridpubscout.com

Find me on LinkedIn as Em Einolander, or follow me on blue

sky at @emilyeino thanks

for listening. And go read a book for all our sakes you.