AI Publishing Startup Plans To Release 8,000 Books Next Year (theguardian.com) 44
Startup Spines plans to publish up to 8,000 books in 2025 using AI, charging authors between $1,200 and $5,000 for editing, design and distribution services. The venture-backed company, which recently secured $16 million in funding, promises to reduce publishing timelines to two to three weeks while allowing authors to retain full royalties.
Co-founder Yehuda Niv describes Spines as a "publishing platform" rather than self-publishing. The announcement has drawn criticism from industry professionals. Independent publisher Canongate condemned the company for automating book production "with the least possible attention, care or craft." The Society of Authors urged writers to exercise caution, citing concerns about AI systems potentially trained on unlicensed content.
Co-founder Yehuda Niv describes Spines as a "publishing platform" rather than self-publishing. The announcement has drawn criticism from industry professionals. Independent publisher Canongate condemned the company for automating book production "with the least possible attention, care or craft." The Society of Authors urged writers to exercise caution, citing concerns about AI systems potentially trained on unlicensed content.
It's training data. (Score:5, Interesting)
I dropped Grammarly when they started shoveling AI at us. I dropped ProWritingAid when they started calling themselves AI. And publishers like this are using your text to train their AI. I made the mistake of buying some marketing, then found out afterward that my manuscripts were fed to an AI to generate summaries for the design team drafting the ads. As nice as that sounds on the surface, the AI was owned by Amazon, who absolutely *WILL* be using that data to train an AI on writing techniques.
I'd avoid anyone claiming AI is involved in the process. Right now the business world is obsessed with gathering all the data to train their AIs. Don't let your creative output be stolen by these assholes for their training sets. How to avoid them? Hire human editors and self-publish. Yes, that process takes time and money, but you either do that, or you become part of the training set that will eventually replace humans from the seeds of creativity to the published works.
Just because I sound paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get us.
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everything you read from now on will be written by AI.
I don't believe that's true. If we're talking about books (and we are) certainly there will be a lot of pulp fiction being churned out by AI, and yes I find it easy to imagine many of the best sellers being of this variety, and that's fine... but just like how not every film made is done by a studio like Disney, not every book is going to be churned out by an AI. There will always be humans writing for other humans, and I firmly believe there will always be an audience and a market for it. It may end up no
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An article appeared this week from an academic at one of the southern hemisphere's most prestigious universities claiming AI had diminished the value of a university degree. Namely that students, domestic or foreign, were submitting assignments generated partially or fully by AI and that it was increasingly impossible to discern whether the student had even a basic understanding of the subject matter and that plagiarism is becoming an obsoleted concept when a machine writes the content for you and the degre
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Making something harder is can be better, I think that is a concept modern society is missing, we learn from the effort, you shouldn't go to school to pass but to learn, learning takes effort. We are losing important basic skills like map reading. Yes in the past skills where lost but those skills where being replaced with new required ones now when you don't even have to think its becoming real problem.
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While I applaud your intent to keep it from being AI-fodder, I suspect it'll still be used to train AI as soon as it's online/published by humans anyway. Sorry, I don't have any better ideas.
You're sadly probably not at all wrong. I've had a lot of long thinks on the problem of how to get any form of published content out there without it becoming fodder for the AI industry, and I don't know what the solution could be outside of returning to the old-school tape and magazine trading of yesteryear. But who would participate in that, now that it's "so easy" to just grab content online? And how long before some "fan" tosses the whole collection up online anyway, if you're lucky enough to have even
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a lot of long thinks on the problem of how to get any form of published content out there without it becoming fodder for the AI industry
Best way's probably wait a few years until current AI bubble bursts. They are consuming massive amounts of money on all these AI systems that will probably never be made back, And the amount of electricity they are demanding to train their AIs is reaching up into the 320,000 Gigawatt range.
So astronomical that AI training should quite frankly be banned out of CO2 e
Who will read those 8000 books? (Score:3)
If there are paying customers for all those books that may (or may not be) generated and/or edited by AI... then great! But... I suspect the value of the written-word has fallen dramatically in the last few years---what's the average return on an average book on amazon? Probably too low to bother for most people, unless you can turn out a dozen books a day... which may be the whole point, until even that market dries up.
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AI will be reading them. Robots need stimulation too, man.
The books will be read by AI, reviews by AI and you'll have 'book of the week' on the new AI podcast on tiktok.
By 2025, (yes. I know) the AI will be fighting for robot rights, unionizing and demanding a four day working week.
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It's the building blocks AI will do (Score:2)
When you remove descriptive paragraphs, clothing descriptions, gun descriptions, cultural references and purple prose; how much of a story is left for a typical novel?
For some authors, one could nearly interchange chapters from one book with another for large parts of a new book.
https://opentextbc.ca/building... [opentextbc.ca]
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That's very funny man - AIs all the way down.
(Hope there aren't humans in pods at the very bottom -- coding AIs in their sleep )
Maybe an AI with 16000 compute units will demand a 2,000,000-hour working week.
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I once read that the publishing industry sells more books in the month before Christmas than the rest of the year, which seems to indicate that most books aren't voluntarily bought by people to read for themselves. I suspect companies like this are simply undercutting a segment of a market that's already pr
Because not enough books? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is about the demand for "publication" of books by aspiring authors who don't understand what traditional publishers do and definitely don't want to hear about the constant overwhelming flood of manuscripts the publishers receive and the impossibility of publishing all of them. They are tired of working a cash register and want to stay home and write stories for a living, and none of the publishers even bother to answer their email, which is incredi
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It's not really even much of a discount vs traditional predatory publishers.
Like that song from 1984 (Score:3)
"But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen."
"It was only a hopeless fancy, It passed like an April day, But a look and a word and the dreams they stirred They have stolen my heart away."
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Probably true, but I don't think that's what this is about. This is a "Vanity Press" with an AI for an editor.
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English writing has been low quality since ages. Seems rare to find an author knowing or using words like leave, escape, enter, rise, capture, for instance. Bestseller author or not, it's all something with get slapped onto it.
Will be crap (Score:3)
I usually read what the authors credit their editors with. More often than not, there are major suggestions, based on a deep understanding of what story the author wants to tell. "AI" cannot make those. Better pay a real editor.
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Don't worry, AI authors will credit their AI editors. This will more than satisfy the AI readers, who will be sure to respond with 5-star ratings.
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And 5-star reviews by AI buyers! Too bad smart people can spot these by the quality of their writing...
It's gonna happen anyway (Score:2)
Independent publisher Canongate condemned the company for automating book production "with the least possible attention, care or craft."
Entry barriers to printing and publishing dead-tree books still seem pretty high, and anything that lowers them is probably going to gain traction in the short term. In the long term though, this could whore the book publishing market even further. OTOH, it might democratize the market. And sadly, maybe both of those possible outcomes are effectively synonymous. As for "attention, care or craft", those are luxuries in the eyes of someone whose choice is between foregoing those niceties and not being publish
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>Entry barriers to printing and publishing dead-tree books still seem pretty high
There are options. Amazon is absolutely killing traditional publishers by offering double the royalty payments. If you can set up your own epub (which isn't rocket science) and register with Amazon and open a KDP account, publishing is free.
Since physical copies are printed on-demand, there's no charge for that either.
Now, advertising your book and getting people to buy it? That's still a bit of a challenge.
Re:It's gonna happen anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
That may be so, but I think what's really killing the book market is something else. I haven't run across a decent new author in a decade. My suspicion is that the death of the magazine is what killed books, as new authors no longer have a decent training ground. Possibly also the publishers have been bought by a corporation that has "more important things to think about" than having good editors.
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I haven't found any good Sci-Fi authors in a couple of decades, but that's mostly because I've been too busy to keep up with what's coming out. :) However, in general, I'll agree with you that the death of magazines has had an impact. The other obvious impact is so much stuff is online that I believe fewer are reading books, including e-books.
As for the "training ground" moving, I agree with that too. One place some authors have moved to is "fan fiction". If you look around there's some stuff there that is
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Fanfic has always been there. That's what August Derleth came out of. But it has always had a VERY sparse production of good authors.
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If it's anything like blogging sites democratizing online publishing, most of it will be crap, at least that's my experience with programming blogs. Maybe only 1-2% of programming blogs on a site like Medium are anything abo
HAAH communication protocol (human-AI-AI-human) (Score:2)
Right... (Score:2)
Classic line that I've heard a lot of well-known writers say: someone comes up to them, and says "I've got this great idea for a story. I'll give it to you, you write the story, and we'll split the proceeds."
That's who this is for - they can't write, and/or aren't willing to sit and write, they come up with a Brilliant New Idea (it's not, and been done a ton of times before), and want the chatbot to write it for them.
"Potentially" trained on unlicensed content? (Score:2)
I think it's pretty obvious to everyone that the word "potentially" serves no truthful purpose in that phrase.
ChatGPT wrote this response for me (Score:2)
AI has no passion, no voice, and no soul. What it churns out are bland, formulai
Re:ChatGPT wrote this response for me (Score:4, Insightful)
These aren't books written by an AI. The AIs we've got aren't up to that yet. These are books written by someone (probably) edited by an AI. Think of it as ensuring that the LLM can figure out a plausible meaning for each sentence. That's still not good, but it does add value.
Already done (Score:2)
Adobe is already offering to take money from artists, for helping them 'improve' their creations, using Adobe's AI.
Did that get a Slashdot article?
Eight thousand books in a year? (Score:2)
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Darn, I'm jaded today.