AI Just Closed This Publisher

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Advances in AI often raise interesting questions and implications on a large scale. We’ve talked about music, politics, and cancer research. But the further we get into this technology, the more these implications will stop being theoretical and have lasting impacts. For one small business owner, this has already happened. This is how AI shuts down a business. 

The first line of Julie Ann Dawson's closure announcement is, “Effective March 6, 2024, I will begin the process of winding down Bards and Sages publishing.” 

You can only imagine the emotions she was feeling when she wrote those words. Back in 2002, she started the small publishing company to produce content for role-playing games, which included a quarterly magazine and supplements to games like Dungeons and Dragons. Over the years, she went on to publish anthologies, novels, and magazines. 

As you read through her closure announcement, she lists a few reasons why she is closing. Once she lists some personal reasons, she hits the readers with the final reason: Dawson states, “AI...and authors behaving badly.”

Like many small publishing houses, Dawson gets submissions for publication. The process takes hours a week, and now it's taking longer because of the obvious AI-generated submissions. See, unlike Amazon, and how they have allowed AI to take over, for a small speculative fiction publisher, they reviewed the submissions and are quickly able to tell the difference between human creativity and the large language model's attempts to write a story. 

And while the fight between small publishing houses and Amazon has been going on for years, Dawson has pointed out that this gap between the publishers will only continue to rise. As we noted in our coverage of AI-generated books on Amazon, it takes minutes to produce that content and sell it. The industrial standard of the “cream will rise to the top” is no longer good enough. As Dawson pointed out, algorithms decide what will rise, and AI bots will be better at manipulating those algorithms. 

Dawson, during an interview with 404 Media, stated that the people turning out these AI stories “…are more enamored with the idea of being a writer than the process of being a writer.” 

This notion has led Dawson to state that it has less to do with AI and more with the people who use AI. People will harass her with negative reviews, prank calls, and vulgar insults after she rejects their AI work. 

While this might not be the first business to shut down because of AI, it also won’t be the last. The influx of content into an already oversaturated market will have a huge impact on publishing. But as we cover every week, it will touch everyone. Let’s just hope we are ready!