Human VS AI First – A Publishing Take

There’s been so much talk about particularly generative AI in the creative industries recently that it might be time for a brief post outlining our approach at Pudding Press.

Overall, the jury is out about how much AI might help things like productivity and be used as a great tool for all the behind the scenes things that humans either do inefficiently for sub minimum wage, or don’t do and get in a mess with.

As we have never had a big workforce and have made a standpoint over the years not to pay below London living wage and not use some of the gig economy freelance platforms, you can imagine that Pudding Press has always gone with the latter of those options.

Presumably AI technology should be something that could make life better, if with some caveats and side-effects (see the motor car, plane, currency and nuclear fission as examples).  However, it is being endlessly hyped at the moment, and yet is still at an embryonic stage so there isn’t anything that we have particularly experimented in re AI that seems that useful. We’re watching from the sidelines much like everyone else, even as our phones and laptops sprout more and more AI accoutrements we didn’t ask for.

In terms of generative AI the company viewpoint is totally different. We started as a publisher of human works, of moderately unpopular fiction. The Pudding Press founder’s dream was to publish her own work without having to beg and plead too much (but within an editorial structure) and then move on to being able to publish other work. 

Most writers like writing (surprisingly not all) and these writers won’t really want their potential livelihoods being taken over by a language prediction model that can produce smooth sounding but ultimately vacuous e-books.

This is an example of the reason for creative industry folk to not want to be replaced by cheap and free AI bots, and we wholeheartedly understand that. Universal Basic Income might make things a bit less urgent but overall writers are going to want to publish and be read, heard etc.

Being an arts company, we don’t want to do anything unethical in that field so are happy to remain human publishers (and that counts for the art and illustration we use too).

Beyond this, probably the main reason that we will keep publishing human as opposed to AI work is that writing and art is not just something pleasing on a flat page. It is relational.

Surely this is the most important part of any of it? This goes for the writer whose 200 year old book moves you, to the audiobook read by a favourite actor or voice, to the imperfectly designed hand-drawn logo or book cover. You can’t have a human relationship with a probability predictor that spits out polished potential images or sentences.

In fact it isn’t even an it. When and if AI gains self-awareness we might have to have the conversation again, which is why Human First sounds a bit icky even now as a slogan. Something that started out okay but is used in the particular fascist dystopia in 2982.

Yet we do have to recognise that the human writer who loses their rent payment isn’t the only casualty in letting this type of non-relational work flood our creative platforms. It is intrinsically not creative and not honestly able to be the human contact we all crave. It is a type of fiction itself but not one that is nourishing any more than it is helping the arts economy.

Therefore, despite other potential objections from environmental damage to the economic damage current generative AI is doing to the industry, unfortunately aided and abetted by financial and political forces, the simple reason we are remaining a human publisher is just because what would the point be in non-human creative work.

It is true this isn’t seeming to be a financially lucrative decision. We can’t afford to make audiobooks of our titles yet (although the world is now flooded with AI audio books). Selling books against the flood of AI driven pulp fiction, or the big human names (or bland stories) that mainstream publishers think can be marketed, or the mountain of Canva-made instructional e-books is not easy either. Gaining a platform is also getting hard with social media algorithms changing all the time and giant dumps of low quality content all over the internet every moment.

Yet overall maybe these things are just forcing us to think differently about what it means to be a human-led publishing company in the 2020s, so for now we’re willing to embrace it as a chance to look at our business model.

If you like human writing there are lots of ways to support this for free if you aren’t in the position to buy something. For us and all other human arts and writing projects, please do give us a like or share on social media, or borrow a book from the library. Let AI be a fabulous tool if that’s what it grows to be but we don’t have to be ruled by it or any tech overlords right now.