Artificial Intelligence

News

HarperCollins Calls Itself an ‘AI Inputs Company’ — While Its Best-Seller Is an Erotic Hockey Novel

HarperCollins CEO Robert Thomson described the publisher as an 'AI inputs company' this week, the same quarter its biggest bestseller is an erotic hockey novel called Heated Rivalry. Publishing surrealism, 2026 edition.

Authors

The Man Who Continued Sherlock Holmes Now Uses ChatGPT

Anthony Horowitz — keeper of the Holmes and Bond literary estates — has admitted to using ChatGPT in his writing process. The confession lands differently when the confessor is the author most trusted with literary inheritance.

News

Mark Zuckerberg Personally Authorized the Heist, Say Five Publishers Suing Meta

Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage filed a landmark AI copyright lawsuit on May 5, alleging Meta downloaded 267 terabytes of pirated books with Zuckerberg's explicit blessing—after briefly considering paying for them.

News

The University of Chicago Press Is Joining a Union. It Took 130 Years.

A supermajority of University of Chicago Press staff have signed union cards, days after 600 Hachette employees did the same. Publishing's labor reckoning is not slowing down.

Reviews

Survey Confirms What Everyone Suspected: Nearly Half of Publishing Pros Use AI

A BISG and BookNet Canada survey finds that 47% of North American publishing professionals already use AI tools — despite significant copyright concerns. Ambivalence, it turns out, is the new industry standard.

Publishing Industry

Publishers Are Feeding Your Manuscript to ChatGPT. The Authors Guild Is Not Amused.

The Authors Guild has issued a stark warning: editors and agents are quietly uploading unpublished manuscripts to consumer AI tools without asking. Now there's a push for contractual consent clauses.

News

What Is a Book Worth? The Anthropic Settlement Offers an Answer: About $2,931

The $1.5 billion Anthropic copyright settlement — the largest in U.S. history — calculates the value of a writer's work at roughly $2,931 per book. The fairness hearing is scheduled for May 14. The harder question will not be on the docket.

Reviews

The Ghost in the Manuscript: Why AI Detection Is Publishing's Least Interesting Problem

Publishing's answer to the AI problem is apparently more AI. Maris Kreizman's sharp new essay argues the real issue is not the technology — it is the industry's long war on its own editors.

Reviews

The New York Times and the Critic Who Borrowed a Sentence from a Machine

The NYT has parted ways with critic Alex Preston after he admitted using AI in a January review, which happened to reproduce language from a Guardian piece. The mechanism of accountability worked, more or less. The more interesting question is what the episode actually reveals.

Reviews

The Voices of the Dead Cost Five Dollars a Month

Bob Dylan launched a Patreon selling imagined voices of nineteenth-century historical figures, signed by ghost authors who don't exist. Everything points to AI. And the Nobel Laureate in Literature is at the center of it.

Reviews

Asking the Dead to Review Your Essay

David Abulafia died in January. By March, Grammarly had him reviewing your prose. The story of how a grammar tool impersonated real writers — including a dead historian — without asking.

News

A Publisher Pulls a Book Over AI Allegations — and Nobody Can Quite Say What the Rules Are

A publisher withdrew a title this week after readers raised concerns about AI involvement in its writing. The incident reveals not a clear policy failure but a more embarrassing truth: the industry has no coherent policy at all.