How are publishers using AI and what are the potential use cases in the future? Why is this an exciting time in publishing for those who use the new tools to expand their creative possibilities? Thad McIlroy and I have a wonderful discussion about the current state of AI in publishing, and where we think it might be going next.

In the intro, Audible tests AI-powered search [TechCrunch]; How to avoid book marketing overwhelm [Author Media]; Top 17 self-publishing companies [Nerdy Novelist]; How I professionally self-publish; 30% off ebooks & audio at CreativePennBooks.com, use discount code AUGUST24.

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Thad McIlroy is a nonfiction author and contributing editor, writing at the intersection of AI and book publishing, as well as a publishing consultant. His latest book is The AI Revolution in Book Publishing: A Concise Guide to Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Writers and Publishers.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Why is generative AI so controversial in publishing?





• Ways in which traditional publishers are using AI tools





• How platforms are monitoring and placing guidelines on AI work
  — and why Ingram blocked his book





• The future of licensing — and synthetic data





• The increasing importance of high-quality print books





• Generative AI search and book discoverability





• Why Thad thinks this is the most exciting time in his 50 year career in publishing

You can find Thad at thefutureofpublishing.com and his new book at Leanpub.com

Transcript of Interview with Thad McIlroy

Joanna: Thad McIlroy is a nonfiction author and contributing editor, writing at the intersection of AI and book publishing, as well as a publishing consultant. His latest book is The AI Revolution in Book Publishing: A Concise Guide to Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Writers and Publishers. So welcome back to the show, Thad.

Thad: Thank you very much, Joanna. It's good to be back. I was thinking, did we start talking first maybe 10 years ago, that we've been staying in touch?

Joanna: Yes, I think so. You've been on the show several times, and I always read your site, The Future of Publishing. It's so good that we're on the same page now, I think, with AI.

Thad: We are, indeed.

Joanna: So let's get into it. I mean, in this industry, we've all been using aspects of AI in publishing for years. Like the Amazon algorithms, for example, or Google search.

Why is the use of generative AI, in particular, so emotional and controversial in the publishing industry, when other businesses are adopting it with enthusiasm?

I know my husband's company is doing it, and there's lots of companies rolling things out, but in publishing, it seems like a no-no.

Thad: It really does, and it's such a fraught topic. It is such an awkward time to be talking to folks about technology when it's just explosive in many ways and suddenly an untouchable.

I think there's more than one aspect to it, right? There's, on the one hand, this feeling of having been violated. There's so much press about AI companies having hoovered up, as is often said, the content. People have this sense —

Authors have this sense, that every book of theirs has already been ingested into an AI system, which is thoroughly inaccurate.

If you're not following the story closely, and you hear stories of hundreds of thousands of books, you don't have any sense as an author of the fact that it was actually a relatively small number of books that got into some of these large language models. Regardless, the sense is that everything got hoovered up.

Then I think there's a secondary sense that I get from some of my author friends where they say, “Well, if my books are already in there, then the AI can recreate books like mine, and that will push me out of business,” that kind of sense.

That's a hard one to explain exactly why that's not likely to be true in any reasonable way. Then I get a sense from people, too, there's a lot of mystique around AI. Giving it a name like artificial intelligence, and all this science fiction, and so on.

So there's that kind of technological apprehension, which again, you can understand that. Then that leads to this sort of sense that these machines are going to try and take over creativity, which again, is a real sense of violation. So all those things are churning around at the same time.

Joanna: It's so interesting, isn't it? Like that last one, ‘will machines take over creativity?' Or people who leave comments on people like me and other people or use AI saying, “Oh, you should write your own books,” when I've got like 15 years of doing this. It's that somehow it's taking something away. Whereas I was working with Claude.ai earlier today —

I feel so much more creative when I work with Claude and Chat.

Is that the sense you get? I guess where I'm going with this is, so much of the criticism is from people who haven't even tried these models in a proper way, like without a terrible prompt.

Thad: Yes. Yes, exactly. I see people, they'll try ChatGPT, usually that one first, sometimes Claude, whatever. Let's say ChatGPT, they try it, they do a couple of prompts, and the first one you do, you're just kind of amazed. “Wow, it sort of talks to me.”

Then you do the second one and the third one and think, well, it's not really answering the way I thought it would. It's not very clever with what it's saying. Then they'll abandon it. I've talked to so many people who've abandoned it so quickly.

Ethan Mollick, that guy who wrote Co-Intelligence, which I consider the best kind of starter guide to AI, all round starter guide, he says —

You need 10 hours. That's his rough rule of the law of how to expose yourself to the technology before you can abandon it.

You know, after 10 hours, you can say, no, to hell with this, it's not for me. By that point, you've exposed yourself, you've worked with it. You know what it can do, and then you can make an informed choice.

Joanna: Yes, I think that's right. To me, the sense of curiosity and play is so important. It's iterative. I've been using the tools now, and I know you have too, for several years now, these generative ones.

I've been using Midjourney. I've just been playing with version 6.1 which is just being released on Midjourney. Obviously, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the latest there. Just as we speak today, there's some beta things from ChatGPT around a massive output.

So this is moving really fast. I know different indie authors using generative AI for different things already. But in your book, you do outline ways that traditional publishers are looking at using generative AI tools.

In what ways are publishers using these [generative AI] tools?

Thad: In the book, I go at it from two angles. One, I have a short chapter where I quote from the Big Five because a l