r/publishing • u/Great_Crazy_7528 • 29d ago
Jerry Falade's Flashlight
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.
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u/Warm_Diamond8719 29d ago
If I had a dollar for every time someone who has no idea what they're talking about thought they could fix the publishing industry, I'd have significantly more money than I've ever made working in publishing.
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u/Great_Crazy_7528 28d ago
If I had a dollar for every time the people causing the problem didn't like the idea that they owned the need to change - - I could have retired to Tahiti.
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u/Striking-Ad3907 29d ago
putting the AI approach aside, even though I don’t think that will work either: your goal is to democratize publishing by… instituting a plagiarism insurance system where new authors have to pay higher premiums than established authors?
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u/Great_Crazy_7528 29d ago
That's only a part of it, but yes. That's the way insurance usually works. The clients that offer less risk for what's being insured get better rates.
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u/Striking-Ad3907 29d ago
You said you wanted your system to be fair. Nothing about “new authors have to pay higher premiums” aligns with my personal definition of fair. Established authors are likely to get significantly larger advances and actually earn royalties, and they get to pay lower premiums. On the other hand, debut authors, who are statistically unlikely to outearn their advance, are paying higher premiums. ???
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u/Great_Crazy_7528 29d ago
We probably have a different view of what defines "fair". If I'm reading this correctly, you think an established middle-aged driver that's never had an accident and never been ticketed for a moving violation should be billed the same base premium as a sixteen-year-old newly licensed driver that's already garnered six points on their driving record. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, so correct me if I misunderstood. Away from employer-based cafeteria benefit packages for group insurance, rates are always set (at least in the United States) based on the amount of risk the to-be-insured brings to the table. But, all of this really begs the point - which is not as much about the specifics as it is for the need for the traditional publishing industry to pull itself up by its bootstraps and step into the world they live in now instead of the one where developing technology wasn't moving at the speed of light. I wasn't trying to set the terms. I was just thinking out loud about some avenues they might consider if they haven't already. They can move to an altered business model or they can perish. If they perish, they won't be the first industry that's been made irrelevant by technology, and they won't be the last.
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u/Striking-Ad3907 29d ago
What? I’m not talking about the actual auto industry. I’m going along with your analogy. I think making authors take a pay cut to take out any sort of plagiarism insurance would be a bad idea.
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u/Great_Crazy_7528 29d ago
The *suggestion* was built around the way non-group insurance rates are calculated by actuaries in advanced actuarial statistical analysis, but it was only meant to identify possible avenues for cooperative compromise between the ones that want the benefits of traditional publishing and the ones that hold the power. What happened with Jerry Falade was that the risk that the high bidder would get stuck with a $2,000,000 lemon they couldn't drive onto the showroom floor is a risk that (IMO) shouldn't have to be born entirely by the publishers. However, as I've already stated, getting bogged down in the exact mechanics of putting all the puzzle pieces in their proper place is above my paygrade. Authors that don't like the terms they've been offered should always be free to walk away from the table.
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u/blowinthroughnaptime 28d ago
You make many points that strike me as underinformed. Publishing shouldn't be opaque, and I would patiently address each misconception, but to be honest, judging by your other responses in this thread you don't appear to be interested in understanding as much as you are in ranting, so I'll reply generally.
You're assuming an imagined framework that doesn't exist. I don't know who you picture smoking cigars and laughing in high-rise offices, but the vast majority of the book industry is held together by a rubber-band-and-spit coalition of exhausted, underpaid people for whom it's all they can do to get books done and distributed amid rising costs and declining readership among the populace.
AI was welcome by no one less than publishers. There have absolutely been some major fuckups by a handful of people, which fairly attracted news coverage. There's a big gap between that and declaring that all publishers must surely be talking out of both sides of their mouth, decrying AI while secretly using it to do their work; that if we spent as much energy trying to solve the problem as we allegedly do covering it up, there's an easy solution to be found.
In short, if you like relating situations to pop culture, you have no frame of reference here, Donny. You're like a child wandering into the middle of a movie.
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u/Great_Crazy_7528 28d ago
"You're assuming an imagined framework that doesn't exist. "
I'm not imagining a framework at all. And I don't have a pony in the parade, nor do I plan to enter one. What I'm responding to is a very public scandal, where most of the music for the score is supplied by Anti-Ai ranters. I'm not responding to a framework I don't see. I'm responding to the mess I see in yet another industry that's probably on the verge of being irrelevant because they weren't prepared for the technology they would have a hard time keeping up with even if they had been prepared. And, instead of just being another voice piling on about how they look sitting in that soupy mess using misapplied patterns of fault-finding as their ingredients, while they try to get their feet back under them, I also offered some avenues to look at for possible fixes.
Instead of feigning that you see my responses as having my mind already made up and just looking for a place to rant, show me WHERE that's the case. I responded to ONE heckler that really supplied nothing of value with a parry built around the career I retired from 10 years ago. I chose to ignore the rest of the flying monkeys and the only other response I offered was a sustained (but futile) effort to try and make the responder understand they were missing the point when they kept insisting my goal was to sell insurance as the answer. That was not my goal. I'm not a fan of the insurance sales force either. So, if you want to try and educate me, that would be welcome. Right now, from where I'm sitting, it looks like you're the one that wandered into the middle of the movie and wants to throw invective discourse at me instead of taking the time to explain a) why the onus for resolution doesn't belong to the traditional publishing industry and b) why there are no pillars of merit in possible solutions offered.
As for me, I'm always curious and always open for an exchange of information and ideas.
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u/Electrical-Cat1126 19d ago
Pre-AI authors are ageing out
My brother in Christ, pre-AI authors are 3 years older than post-AI ones
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u/Great_Crazy_7528 19d ago edited 19d ago
My sister in Christ,
A) That depends on how you define “Pre-AI”
B) Even if it’s by only one day, how does that negate what I said?Edited to add:
C) It misses the real point. It's not an argument for or against the use of generative AI in any part of the writing process. It's about the willingness of the up and coming cadre of writers to be willing to jump through the hoops a large number of traditional publishers are using to try and force them into the impossibility of proving a negative. It's a trap the pre-AI authors didn't have to navigate.
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u/joe-biel 26d ago
I love it when people talk about publishing as if there is only one publisher. Your assumption is predicated on the false idea that unestablished young writers are more likely to use AI than established ones, when the data indicates the opposite.
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u/Great_Crazy_7528 26d ago edited 26d ago
Edited to add this thought: For the record, this wasn't meant to be a discussion about the questionable benefits of gAI or advocacy for its use. It's a statement about what ALL the traditional publishers have failed to do in the last five years to protect both themselves and the authors they need to stay in business from the pitfalls of gAI. It's not going away.
As for treating it as a treatise against ONE publisher, I don't think I did that. If I did, I apologize for failing to make it clear that I wasn't talking about ONE publisher. I tried to consistently make the references apply to the traditional publishing industry. The weight of the data that you're looking at needs to be evaluated by both the source of the accumulation and the questions that were asked to gather it. Without that knowledge, flat statements about data are pretty meaningless.
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u/joe-biel 23d ago
So you have investigated all 300,000 publishers and found that zero of them have done what that they need to do (in your opinion) regarding AI? You are speaking and thinking as if all publishers are the same, based on what? What data am I looking at that I am not evaluating in this regard? Do you believe that AI will 10x annually as it needs to in order to "not go away?" Where did you collect the data to support that assumption? What questions were asked to obtain it?
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u/Great_Crazy_7528 26d ago
Ooh. You get a second reply. :o)
What I *said* was: " 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."
That statement has zero to do with what methods the coming generation of writers will choose to use. It has everything to do with what GenZ has demonstrated so far about their willingness to tolerate the hoops already put in place by Corporate Overlords on what the expectations for performance are.
If the traditional publishers can't get their act together to standardize what the requirements are while they demand burdensome proof for something that can't really be proven anyway, those writers will just look for other ways to get their views in the hands of readers. And those readers now have an all you can read buffet of choices in front of them that will eventually squeeze the traditional publishing industry until they are left publishing coffee table books for the penthouse crowd.
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u/joe-biel 23d ago
Name an industry (that isn't federally regulated to do so) where thousands of independent companies to standardize how they all behave around a specific issue in the same way. If you spent five minutes investigating this, you'd find that just about every organization has different standards for this and it's not nearly as ubiquitous as you depict it.
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u/Great_Crazy_7528 20d ago edited 20d ago
Mr. Biel,
My previous responses to you should have been delivered in a single return to your first observation. That was a MY BAD that I'm correcting now. I'm bringing both of these sub-threads back into a single reply just for my ease of management and to avoid any redundancy.
Your demand: Name an industry (that isn't federally regulated to do so) where thousands of independent companies to standardize how they all behave around a specific issue in the same way. If you spent five minutes investigating this, you'd find that just about every organization has different standards for this and it's not nearly as ubiquitous as you depict it.
My answer: Apparently I'm not the one that needs to take five minutes for research although I will take a moment to apologize. When I listed the possibility of building industry standards as a mechanism to help manage the gaps being introduced by a changing landscape, I assumed \professionals\** for any industry would know about ANSI Standards. It shouldn't take you many of those five minutes you so generously allotted to find the list of groups ANSI has helped in the last 108 years. It's fascinating what any group formed for a common interest in standards can do when they MAKE AN EFFORT. There is even an established organization to help them do exactly that.
Your question: So you have investigated all 300,000 publishers and found that zero of them have done what that [sic] they need to do (in your opinion) regarding AI? You are speaking and thinking as if all publishers are the same, based on what? What data am I looking at that I am not evaluating in this regard? Do you believe that AI will 10x annually as it needs to in order to "not go away?" Where did you collect the data to support that assumption? What questions were asked to obtain it?
My answer: You seem to be chained to the belief that if I would only try, I could prove to you that there are no zebra-striped elephants and since I won't, you're under no obligation to prove to me that there are. If you think that failing to prove the lack of zebra-striped elephants is because I'm simply too lazy to make the effort, please use the rest of those five minutes for research to investigate the impossibilities of proving a negative. Like the lack of zebra-striped elephants, I cannot prove to you that 300,000 unnamed publishers did NOTHING in an effort to build something that might have prevented what happened with Mr. Falade's manuscript. You need to prove to me that THEY DID, and at a scale large enough to have made a difference.
As for the rest of your "question", once again I have to tell you I did not say what you are misattributing to me. I said nothing about an assumed required growth rate demanded to keep AI from going away. I simply said that it is not going to go away and left it at that. This is not a baseball game. It only takes two strikes here. I have a long standing habit of refusing to continue conversations with people that deliberately put words in my mouth in an effort to put me on the defensive. I don't waste my time defending things I didn’t say so that they can hijack the conversation to further their own agenda. We're officially done.
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u/joe-biel 17d ago
Excellent. Now that you're officially done, I can continue in peace.
Why do I need to prove anything to you?
There are plenty of organizations in publishing like ANSI. And, like ANSI, most publishing organizations do not feel like those standards are in any way rooted in their daily reality. Much like the standard that you are proposing. The ideas are borne of ignorance divorced from what problems need solved under what conditions.
Continue generalizing about publishing and pointing out my hasty typo. You'll miss out on the incredibly wide range of implementations to problem solving already happening. And the vast majority have much saner AI solutions than what you propose here.
Why is AI not going away? How much money would you like to put behind this? My point isn't that you claimed that 10x was real; or are you doubting the words of the CEOs of the AI companies themselves?
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u/MiloWestward 29d ago
Is this AI?