Writers have been grappling with the creative ethics around AI since large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT first became available for mainstream use in 2022. Since then we’ve seen high-profile class-action lawsuits, major Hollywood strikes and grassroots digital boycotts across the creative industries globally.

There has been anger and fear aplenty amongst those who make their living from words, and who can blame them? LLMs can only do what they can do because of the uncredited and uncompensated scraping of copyrighted work en masse; this and data centers that guzzle unconscionable amounts of water. It’s the heist of the century, but the moral quandary stays under the rug for the hundreds of thousands of people who use LLMs daily. And for every writer who is seething and disappointed, there is also a writer who is quite happily throwing their writing into an AI tool and using it to sound out, write and edit new work.

One of these writers is Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018. She sparked controversy this week when she told an interviewer: “Often, I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’ Even though I know about hallucinations and many factual errors in the algorithms in terms of economics and hard data, I have to add that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportions.” People on the internet have been predictably up in arms about this. There are calls to distinguish AI assistance from AI authorship, laments over the homogenization of language, and insistences that AI simply has no place in the arts and humanities.

For Tokarczuk, a revered and respected master of her craft, AI is a useful research tool. For the people who lost some respect for her this month, it’s a sycophantic “yes-and” machine that runs on stolen work amounting to billions in theft from artists. Ultimately it is both of these things at once, and this is what makes it so divisive. I think most authors would agree that a work of literature should never be AI-generated in its entirety, but there is a large spectrum of opinions on whether and how it should be used developmentally and editorially. Indeed, it’s not the first time we’ve had to measure our ethics against our desires for convenience—and it probably won’t be the last.

The publishing houses have their own perspectives, too. In March, Hachette Book Group—one of the largest publishers in the world—called off the US publication of a horror novel called Shy Girl after allegations that its author Mia Ballard relied heavily on AI to write it. During the weeks that allegations surfaced readers were scouring the text, which had already been published in the UK, for hallmarks of AI-generated prose and posting their findings online. Ballard has denied the allegations. She wrote to the New York Times, which broke the story: “This controversy has changed my life in many ways and my mental health is at an all time low and my name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do.” Hachette’s official position on AI states: “We are opposed to ‘machine creativity’ in order to protect original creative content produced by humans.” Their AI detection tools supposedly flagged Shy Girl as being up to 78% AI-generated.

When I asked an Editor at Penguin Random House UK about their attitudes towards AI, she told me: “Penguin has poured lots of money into a ChatGPT license, so we’ve been encouraged to use it and experiment with it when it comes to planning campaigns. Nobody talks about the political or environmental implications. It feels divorced from the real world, like we’re operating in a vacuum with it.” The imprint she works for is a literary one and so the publishing cycle is quite different from commercially-focussed divisions. “We’re really paying attention to the craft, which can only come from a human. The quality of writing is our whole thing, so we’re not using AI to edit manuscripts. It wouldn’t be right.”

Whilst it feels correct to draw the line at using AI to edit, it’s interesting to note that publishers are not under the same degree of scrutiny as writers are when it comes to how they use AI. The hypocrisy abounds. The same editor told me: “[my division] are publishing lots of nonfiction about the dangers of AI, so institutionally we’re probably a lot more aware of it than other places. But we are also being encouraged to use it. We’ll be in a meeting where an editor is presenting a book about AI bringing on the end times, and the next meeting we go into will be about how to use AI at work.”

Just as authors are weighing up ethics and convenience, publishers are weighing up ethics and commerce. Last June more than 70 authors issued a call to action to the big-five publishers, of which Penguin Random House is one, asking them to pledge to never release books that were created by machines. “At its simplest level, our job as artists is to respond to the human experience. But the art we make is a commodity, and our world wants things quickly, cheaply, and on demand,” the letter reads. Despite this, Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt told the LA Times that the retail giant “will sell AI generated books if there is clear demand” and not “ban reputable books published by reputable publishers, even if AI generated, should these be published, labeled and there be clear evidence of customer demand.”

All of this is happening as we’re collectively getting more and more exhausted with the profit drive that’s steering the cost of things into the sky and the quality of them into the gutter. For the benefit of shareholders and shareholders alone, enshittification is at large—and the publishing world is no exception. We’re already seeing an influx of slop that’s harming authors and frustrating consumers. That said, unique and brilliant voices, and especially those from marginalised communities, have always had to struggle to find a platform amongst what is conventional and commercially viable in publishing. AI didn’t create that problem, it’s just putting it on steroids. We can only hope that what emerges next enriches our shared human experience, rather than exploiting and enshittifying it for profit.