Imitative AI as Grift in Publishing
A lot if imitative AI projects are cover for different kinds of grift. Imitative AI is used, for example, to steal content from human creators on Instagram and profit from those people’s work. It is used to convince business that it can drive down prices on ads, then produce the worst ads known to mankind. It tries ot convince tax software companies that its chat can replace customer service people, only to find out that the chat is giving answers that would get their clients audited. It convinces the Mayor of New York that it can answer basic questions about city governance, laws, and regulations and then tells people to break the law. If anyone ever says to you they intend to disrupt something with imitative AI, keep your hand on your wallet.
And now, of course, someone intends to disrupt publishing with imitative AI. It is, of course, bullshit.
Spines, a stupidly named self-publishing service company, claims to want to publish eight thousand books a year using AI. The first clue that they are grift is that the claim to be a publisher but are in reality a service meant to help people self-publish. They charge the writer for their services, unlike a publisher, and accept all comers, completely unlike publishers. It is not a good sign when you start off with bullshit.
They offer the normal range of self-publishing help — proofreading, cover design, metadata compilation. I suspect that they will likely offer some writing as well, given that imitative AI people push writing and art as ways to make money from their services, but that does not appear to be a current offering. Their costs — $1,200 to $5,000 — are in line with industry standard costs. You won’t be saving if you use the service of these “disruptors”. One of the sites I found while researching this, for example, quoted me roughly $4,200 for the services needed to get the last of my books that agents rejected self-published. That price includes a developmental edit (an edit meant to find problems with/help strengthen the story of a book), something Spines does not offer. Though, to be fair, it does not include the cost of generating e-book formats and the like, something Spines will do. Spines claims that they will be faster than other services because they use imitative AI. That may be true, but it also means you are likely to get sub-standard work.
We all know that AI is prone to hallucinations and creating bizarre artwork. It does this because is it merely calculating what should come next in a sequence based on its training data. It has no picture of the world to judge truth from fiction and so you sometimes get nonsense. The most effective way to combat this nonsense is to have a human adjust the work after AI creates it. Given the speeds promised, I suspect you aren’t getting much in the way of real help there. And it also means you are getting decidedly “meh” designs. Imitative AI calculates what should come next based on all the immense data used to train it. This means that it drives toward the median and since its largely trained on the internet, the median tends to not be great.
Basically, you appear to get a pull of the imitative AI quality slot machine lever for five grand.
And that is before you get to the implications of their promise to “publish” eight thousand books a year. Self-publishing is hard. You have to somehow find a way to convince readers to buy your book, a book whose quality no one else has vouched for, in a sea of similar titles. Outside a couple of genres with voracious readers (like romance. Romance readers love to read and buy a ton of books), this is extremely difficult to do. Having eight thousand more titles of uncertain quality in the self-publishing space isn’t going to make those number any easier. The article about Spines points out that author income dropped significantly between 2006 and 2022 and Spines flooding the market is not going to help.
Spines appears to be grift. They claim to a publisher but are actually, at best, a vanity press accepting anyone for a fee. They charge what the self-publishing industry already charges for doing less overall and producing items of uncertain quality. It will nothing to help you sell your book or stand out in an already crowded field. It is using the work of artists, editors, proofreaders, etc. without their compensation in order to profit of self-publishing authors. Perhaps you get it faster, but flooding the self-publishing market with product just makes it harder for any individual author to reach readers. The only people being disrupted are creators. And the only people profiting are, as usual, the grifters.