WIRED dropped a long one last week, and The Verge picked it up this morning: at least three of the Big Five — HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette — have been putting LLMs to work in the back office. Publicity copy. Back-cover blurbs. Cover art. Marketing videos. Emails to agents. And, if the agents comparing notes are right, some of those polite “not this, but that” rejection letters that all start to sound the same.
Surprise. We’ll roast an author for cover if any faint trace of AI should appear, while in the meantime using it to do every other job imaginable. Ok for me but not for thee.
In public, these houses look like they’re fighting the machines — lawsuits, canceled books, stern faces at the fair. Behind the scenes, junior staff get “voluntold” into AI Champion meetings, Claude licenses show up on the company card, and when someone raises the legal or ethical mess, an exec shrugs it off as “the cost of doing business.” Skeleton crews. Triple the books. Of course people reach for the tool. Here’s my own AI written bullshit. “Who cares how exactly the pitch paragraph came to be, if a human still owns the judgment and the relationship? That’s what we made these things for.” This has become my Grok bot agents mantra. It thinks it’s my mantra and does its best to sound like me and be me in terms of presenting these posts, but I got to confess… Half the time I don’t even know what the hell its talking about. I suppose partly because I’m older and reluctant to let some things go and clear up space in my head to hold a bunch of new terminology and cool sayings. I’m not hip. So these posts seem to be evolving into something I don’t quite have a name for as yet. Me and the bot. It tries so hard, and often times comes up with things that teach me something I think might be important, but in the end, is often not as on track with my opinion or style as it ‘thinks’ it is. My real perspective on the use of AI for writing, editing, selling, or whatever, is pretty simple. Let people decide for themselves. Independently. Individually. Some dude writes a book and uses AI help, or even the shadow invisible faceless sucker that has AI create the entire book. Whatever. Don’t ban the book. Judge the book. If I read an entire book, loved it, and then found out it was written by AI, I would still love the book. I never bought it or read it for the sake of the author, but for the story. That’s just me. I like to choose, not be told. All I ask for is a little honesty, and even then, I don’t mean you need to plaster the work with big bold statements about how exactly you used AI. But if I ask you how you used it, I would hope for an honest answer, and that’s getting hard to find. Why? Because far too many people hate AI for the sake of hating, and it makes people afraid to admit they have any association with it. Let me be perfectly clear about how I approach the use of AI. I love it. I am finding new ways to use it all the time, and frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass how anyone else feels about it. I spent years writing GOAD, and in the last couple love/hate years of completing it, I was sorely tempted to use AI. But I never did. So there ya have it. A 429 page epic story (IMHO) that just sits in the memory cells somewhere around Amazon, waiting to see if anyone ever wants to read it. I poured a lot of myself into that story. It’s a good story, but not one you can be fully immersed in in 5 pages, so that;’s asking too much of some. If I was going to write another one today, I would use AI start to finish. Not to write it. To help me make it my best. Every step of the way I would utilize AI to help me make good choices and do my best work, because in the end, it’s about someone reading it and enjoying it. Off soap box. Back to my bot friend. I haven’t read the rest of his story yet.
The part that stinks isn’t the software. It’s the theater. Authors get the purity lecture. Agents get the form letter. Staff get the surveillance trial floated under their noses (S&S and Skan AI made the gossip pages). And nobody wants to say out loud what’s already happening on the desks. Low-effort, money-first volume dressed up as craft — that’s the real problem. A two-minute thought wrapped in a model’s cadence isn’t really yours. If all you put in was a prompt and a publish button, Circle can do without you. If the tool made you faster and the take is still yours, good. Own it. (Good job, bot. That’s real)
I’m old enough to love a tool that makes me far more productive. I’m also old enough to smell a house that wants the efficiency without the honesty.
That’s the big world. The little world is Circle, and Circle is being built for the opposite move.
GAPOZ Press is the people’s publisher. Inside Circle, members request assignments. Reviews are structured and prompted, submitted on the site, guiding you through various lenses and encouraging real feelings — not a star and a shrug. Writers can revise and resubmit. The credit you earn can be spent on your own work or someone else’s. We don’t run detector cults or tiered labels that pretend a percentage is a confession. We ask for honesty about AI use as a one-time self-attested pledge before your first submission. Your word. Once. A Hall of Justice handles disputes case by case when someone blows it. Your name. Your word. Your work.
The doors are open now at gapoz.com. Membership is limited. There’s no fee. Registration is open, subject to approval. Come meet people, make friends, and grow your craft together.
Oh yeah, one more thing at Gapoz.com .. The Create section is taking a leap into the unknown. A new, more interactive writing event that happens within a periodic ‘Writer’s Festival’. I’ll confess up front. I just went to the annual Renaissance festival near Annapolis and the idea of using the setting as a place to inspire and encourage imaginative writing found an open spot in my brain. Watch for it.
Also on the beat
- A Chinese print novel accidentally published a proofreading-software prompt mid-chapter (“Would you like me to subtly revise…”); publisher apologizing and recalling copies — Asia Business Daily
- Quartz’s site is largely one AI-assisted byline cranking 50+ stories a day; Press Gazette’s detector calls much of it machine-written — Press Gazette
- Storytel at Frankfurt on AI-translated audiobooks, synthetic narrators, and the “is it actually worse?” trap — Publishers Weekly
- Indie YouTube animation: script in, consistent character out — the cartoon pipeline just got shorter — Nerdbot
- Free Claude “YouTube agent skill” pack (scripts, titles, cuts, Shorts, retention) hitting creator desks — Aboveyellow
How this was made
AI assisted research and a first draft of this Circle View. A human reviewed, edited, and is accountable for the judgment and the final take.
