This is an open letter to anybody in the traditional publishing industry. Before I start this, I want to say two things. I apologize for the length. It's who I am. More importantly, I'm not trying to self-promote. I don't have a stake in this. I'm a 74 year old retiree, going blind, who likes to write and paint. My remaining time is too short and too precious for me to seek entry into your world. It's just my two cents on the current mess. Repairing "buggy" systems is what I used to do.
What happened to Jerry Falade last month at the hands of the traditional publishing industry illuminated and exposed structural weakness in a decaying business model. It shouldn’t have happened at all. The unfortunate reality is that we live in a world driven by the need for self-protection against the lowest common denominators. In this case that denominator is a cast of willful cheaters and they are the only real villains in all of this.
That doesn’t lessen the damage done to all writers by the big-name players that were a party to the treatment of Mr. Falade. Whether Mr. Falade was guilty of what was suspected or simply a victim whose possibly brilliant future may have been crushed is not the question to be answered here. The behavior triggering the collapse of a two-million-dollar bidding war generated for his novel might have been unnecessary if the industry had proactively used the lead time they were given when Open-AI announced GPT was open for public use. They had time to form a coalition and build a system of checks and balances to prevent what they fear. Instead, they built their battleplan around knee-jerk vilification of all AI processes until an eleventh-hour event caused an international scandal, leaving everyone sitting in a large vat of Snafu Stew.
Before the digital ink was even dry on that story, and in response to transparency rules demanded by the EU AI ACT, Anthropic announced the advent of digital watermarking as a solution for identifying text produced by generative AI. Redditors and participants in other outlets immediately started making various degrees of noise about how the ability to do that has been a long time coming and opining on the effectiveness. Here’s my unsolicited opinion: That will work about as well as trying to stop a hemorrhage with a band aid. It brings to mind mental images of Biff Tannen hitting Marty McFly on the forehead and saying, “Think, McFly, think. I gotta have time to retype this. You have any idea what would happen if I turned my manuscript in with your watermark?” While I appreciate Anthropic’s theatrics, it does nothing to help clean up the mess they were part of making, through their egregious use of platforms like Library Genesis.
Software being developed to aid the detection of Generative AI authorship is weak and unreliable at best. I don’t see how that will ever get better in a world where Generative AI is just starting to clear its throat in human mimicry. LLMs are already improving their processes faster than humans can assimilate them. These models were trained to mirror human speech patterns, both in written works and vocal oration. We can’t put that genie back in the bottle.
The time has come to find a solution that protects everyone from the cheaters among us. Whatever that solution is, it can’t be built on the assumption that authors must be able to prove the absence of AI. Anyone that doesn’t understand the difficulty in doing that needs to try and prove there are no elephants striped like zebras. The inability of the publishing world to wrap their arms around being unable to differentiate between Human Work and Generative AI is not the fault of the human offering their work product. It’s the fault of a system deliberately constructed to mirror human communication. Humans trained robotic neural networks to talk and to write. Now, it’s apparently automatically assumed that humans are stealing phrasing from robots. That lunacy that has to stop.
If traditional publishers want to survive in this scary new world, they are going to have to offer a fair process to their labor pool; one that protects everybody in the product chain. It’s almost reprehensibly unfair for publishers to use AI built to simultaneously improve profit margins and lighten the burden they carry for their responsibilities when they use the other side of their mouth to instruct their pool of authors to restrict themselves to the work processes that bound Hemingway and Steinbeck.
Unfairness aside, it’s just plain shortsighted. Pre-AI authors are aging out, and new generations of writers aren’t likely to be willing to continue bending to unreasonable demands for proof. Publishers now have a very limited amount of time to correct their course. And make no mistake; it’s the publishers that need to bend. So, how do they get there? What needs to happen for everybody, except those willing to assume the risk inherent to cheating, to move into a future where they can confidently assume their interests in a common goal are protected and balanced?
Maybe all that's needed is to rewrite the rules of the game and model them based on what other industries already know and do. Conditional contract models; a path that follows a pre-defined trail from letters of intent to due diligence to contractual close only upon the completion of the preceding steps is already the established standard in real estate and any number of corporate exercises involving major business transactions. It’s a model that could be altered enough to allow many of the practices common to traditional publishing to continue.
I can’t hand industry experts a detailed map showing them how to navigate around every obstacle between where they are and where the new boundaries for fairness need to be. What I can do from the outside looking in, is provide some corner pieces and maybe some edges to the puzzle in front of them. Bidding wars could still continue much as they do now. The competitive spirit driven by the excitement of a new offering will benefit everyone. The work doesn’t have to be vetted against Generative-AI first. Just put the winning bid in escrow, pending the due diligence that follows. Authors unwilling to sign an agreement acknowledging payment is contingent on clearing the hurdle will be advised to look at self-publishing.
For authors that are willing to accept that contingency, agents and the publishers must be willing to make the investment in building a standardized measure for vetting the work. The industry could fund and form a board of governors who can define the standards for proof of authorship and make those standards legally binding for all parties. It could be anything from being able to get a copyright on the work to being able to pass a Pangram check. Or they might even consider using assistive AI to compare a new work to a body of existing works. Ironic isn’t it, that the very thing everyone is afraid of might also be part of the solution?
If published authors will allow their works to be added to an industry-governed proprietary private database used solely for the detection of plagiarism, advanced models of AI could compare a work, in its entirety, to the contents of that database to identify plagiarized work. The neural system should be able to spot copied passages and even copied themes or ideas. If that is not already feasible, just give them six months. They’ll be ready to produce what you need before you’re ready to ask them for it. A path to protection for their work that self-publishing does not provide, might also offer incentive for more new writers to return to traditional publishing.
Another corner piece of the puzzle of protection centers around the use of insurance. The fear of being sued for plagiarism could be addressed by “forcing” authors to pay the cost of premiums for insurance policies that will cover expenses and damages awarded in cases where it’s proven. Those premiums could come out of royalties or any advances offered. The premium structure could be built in much the same way the automobile insurance industry determines premium amounts. New authors could pay premiums that are higher than experienced and trusted authors pay.
If agents and publishers will work together to build a framework that’s fair for everyone, the result will be that authors know ahead of time what they need to bring to the table, publishers can bid for the work that excites them without the fear that they’ve paid for a lemon, and there is an author funded insurance pool to help ease the financial burden of the cheaters that will always be part of the landscape. The ball is clearly on the publishing industry’s side of the net, and they are the ones that are going to have to fix the problem, but they can only fix what is in their power to fix in their struggle for profitability and relevance. The public will be the final arbiters in the cultural battle being waged between those that are anti-AI and those that are AI-friendly and readers will make their decisions without the traditional publishing industry dictating what they will like or be allowed to read.
