Coral Hart

In the major publishing houses, people talk about this all the time within the industry, that so much more of their work in recent years has been given over to stuff that needs doing, like campaign work or liaising with authors.

But it is leaving less and less time for them to do the work of editing because the publishing houses don't have enough staff and all these kind of bigger picture issues.

I mean that I think everybody is talking about what those guardrails could or should be.

It's a very hot topic, I think, among editors all over the place.

But it's a really tricky one because AI detection software is the sort of first thing that you might think, okay, well, everything should get run through one of those.

Those, when you dig into them, pretty unreliable.

Yeah, they're not as good as one might hope.

I mean, they'll pick up extremely obvious instances of AI that they may not pick up.

They just may not pick up everything.

And then then you've got this difficult thing.

Let's say you have a manuscript from an author and you put that through an AI detection software and it comes up like 70% likely AI.

You know, depends who that is.

If this is an author that you are very keen not to, you know, it's relational stuff, the publishing industry.

You don't want to accuse someone of doing something that at the moment, anyway, in the current cultural climate is kind of insulting.

Like, did you actually not write this book?

Did you get, did you cheat, you know?

That's a really difficult conversation to have unless you're completely sure.

And it's really difficult to be completely sure.

The thing about AI writing is that it cannot be original in flavor.

That's the very nature of it.