oh boy

Shortly after scoring a multimillion-dollar book deal for a debut author, the novelist’s agents pulled the plug. They could no longer support the project, they said, because they couldn’t verify that the book had been wholly written by their client.
“This raises so many questions about authorship and what AI means for this industry,” the agency, Europa Content, told the publishers in a July letter after allegations of AI use swirled around “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body,” a crime novel by Jerry Falade.

"with a new AI scandal engulfing publishing seemingly every month, it’s become more difficult to punt questions about its impact into some distant future."

I mean... two very obvious first-order econ reflections here;

1. stop doing "big book deals" to begin with; clearly, authoring isn't that scarce (#1545801, #1542816) and the gatekept publishing rents are rapidly competed toward zero... so, uh, follow the market?
2. Shocking to see 70 established authors demanding their "employers" not to hire the technological-obsolescence competition. WHAT?!

#1449095, #1471628 #1496889, etc.

Yes, it's true... should publishers drop authors who were caught using AI? (Even if the final output is good and appreciated by consumers?!

Desperate to find hits in a time when most people are reading less and less, publishers often look to pick up self-published works that have already found an audience, a category where agents and editors say AI use is especially prevalent.

Horseshit. There's almost nothing new under the sun -- certainly not in fictionland (#1512950??) -- so this is self-contradictory.

Oh, yeah this is going to help?

In an attempt to combat the deluge of slop, the Authors Guild introduced a “human authored” certification that writers can add to their books after signing an attestation. Yet some feel that anything that relies on an honor system lacks the teeth necessary to combat such a far-reaching issue.

oh, and the gatekeepers to the gatekeepers -- the quintessential useless middlemen (actually, middle-women, let's be honest) -- are complaining:

Agents, who act as the intermediary between authors and publishers, have found themselves on the front lines. “I think that agents and editors are now being asked to essentially be police,” said Emma Dries, an agent with Triangle House Literary. She said her inbox has been inundated with more queries than ever, which she attributes to writers using LLMs to mass-spam agents, and has received submissions that seemed clearly AI-generated.

Agents and editors know it’s only a matter of time before the next big AI scandal. “The only silver lining is, thank God, we’re still canceling these books,” as one AI-phobic agent put it. “I don’t know if that will continue to be the case.”

archive: https://archive.md/e9nmI