No thanks to an AI book generation

An AI startup wants to automate book production. I am thankful we can resist it

Greetings all,

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving / few days off / interminable slog through interstate traffic. Next week, we’ll get back to the second installment of how Trump’s election appears to be transforming the tech sector, but for now, a quick look at one reason I’m thankful to be part of a community that’s challenging generative AI and an industry that wants to use it to degrade and devalue creative labor. And while I’m at it, thanks to all of you for reading and for supporting this work, and for doing whatever you do to oppose the machinery hurtful to commonality.

We’ve spent the last two years hearing a pretty interminable stream of promises about the transformational power of AI from so many in the tech industry, observed historic levels of investment plowed into the sector, and watched as OpenAI has emerged as one of the highest-capitalized startups of all time.

Yet so many working examples of AI in action look a lot like the one that made the rounds this week—a dull effort to automate labor in a creative industry, aspiring to profit by driving margins down to the bone. Meet “Spines”, a company that uses “AI publishing technology,” is explicitly aiming for quantity over quality, and to save on costs by using AI to cut out proofreaders, book designers, cover artists, and translators.

Screenshot: Bookseller magazine.

Read through the introductory profile in the trade magazine Bookseller, and you will hear little about a love of books or of writing or much about an interest or dedication to the endeavor of publishing. You will hear canards about “disruption” and an eagerness to automate creative jobs:

Spines recently secured $16m in seed funding and claims to have so far published 273 titles in 2024, 33 of which were published on the same day in September. “We want to publish up to 8,000 books next year. The goal is to help a million authors publish their books,” Yehuda Niv, c.e.o and co-founder of Spines told The Bookseller…

Like Microsoft’s 8080 Books, Spines has a focus on speed. Niv claimed the platform can reduce the time it takes to publish a book from six to 18 months, to two to three weeks. He claimed authors are willing to pay “tens of thousands” on publishing services for self-published books, but Spines costs $1,200 to $5,000 to automate proofreading, cover design, metadata optimization and limited translation services, starting with Spanish.

The story made a splash in the publishing world, for perhaps the obvious reasons, with independent publishers, authors, and literary agents speaking out against the startup. “I hate this on many levels,” Kesia Lupo, an agent with Donald Maass Literary Agency, wrote on X. “I firmly believe that AI should have no place in the content of books and that we have to reject this model as an industry and as a readership.”

And here’s the novelist Lincoln Michel: “A great example of how no one can find actual uses for LLMs that aren't scams or grifts. Quite literally the LAST thing publishing needs is MORE manuscripts, especially low quality and unedited AI regurgitations.”

That last bit is the unspoken part of the equation we can bet is coming; Spines says it’s aim is to help human authors publish their works, for less, but it sure feels like this the beginning of the end-to-end AI-generated content factory, books edition. Where the goal is not to improve the quality of a creative or intellectual project, but to speedrun it. To slash away at the collective effort that creating something like a book requires—the writing, the editing, the design, the proofing, the art—and replace it with automated median output produced from non-consensually acquired training data.

Screenshot of Spines’ website, featuring “stunning book covers.”

I can’t really imagine this company will succeed—for one thing, the product appears to be utter garbage. The price is pretty steep considering it’s all done by AI, and that it’s easy enough to self-publish on Amazon or whatever. But it’s the animating spirit of what drives the enterprise, precisely what AI enables here, that kills me.

This desire to try to gut a field that’s been struggling for years; this aim to enshittify books; this race to the bottom mentality embraced by vultures who see a chance to wring a few bucks out of a low margin industry a lot of people nonetheless still consider pretty vital. This wanton effort to squeeze artists, workers, and independent publishers.

For another, the needle can move here; if the noise is loud enough, AI publishing can get slapped with a stigma that can at least help slow the erosion of the industry. Public shame can be a powerful tool, when warranted! So yeah: This is why I’m thankful that we’re building this community, and that there are people out there willing to go to the mat to oppose things like the AI-enabled automation of book production. (I fully resent that ‘AI enabled automation of book production’ is a phrase I had to write in 2024.)

I’m thankful to the workers and artists in the courts and on the streets pushing back on the encroachment of AI in their fields, to everyone who calls this out whenever they see it, to those like Lupo and Michel who implore their colleagues to resist this stuff. It’s going to get worse before it gets better; we can be thankful at least that we’re in this together. Until next time, hammers up.