The New Reality of Publishing in the AI Era
As artificial intelligence establishes itself as a primary tool for generating content, it is driving sweeping change across the publishing industry. The use of AI in everyday publishing work has surged. Few admit it openly, but the fact that AI is being used is an open secret—and publishing, too, now finds itself in a landscape where the boundaries of copyright grow blurrier by the day.
What It Means to Be an Author Is Changing
Traditionally, an author was someone who shaped their own thoughts and experiences into writing and delivered them to readers. It was an era when only those with real writing talent could become authors—a time when the perception ran strong that only people with a way with words qualified as authors.
But as publishing spread and more people began putting out books, the scope of who counts as an author gradually widened. At a publisher like ours—which deals mainly in practical guides, business and economics titles, and self-help—authors who are not professional writers make up more than 85% of the total. This may well be a natural outcome. People who have achieved something remarkable in their own field are often far removed from the craft of writing.
Drawing the content out of these authors has always been a difficult task. On our YouTube channel 〈Baewoboso〉 (roughly, "Come Learn"), we've shared methods proven in the actual publishing process—techniques for gathering ideas, sorting them into categories with sticky notes, and turning speech into text using STT (speech-to-text). The aim was to somehow draw the tacit knowledge inside an author's head out into explicit form.
How AI Changed Writing
Now we've entered an age where AI writes the text itself. But based on a decade of reviewing several thousand manuscripts, I can tell you that a proposal or manuscript produced by AI carries a distinctive smell. Any reader who reads widely can spot the difference. Just as we sense an odd dissonance in AI-generated images or video, the same resistance comes through in the writing. And yet, watching the growing number of journalists who now write their articles with AI—even across the online press—I find myself genuinely worried that, much like the saying "bad money drives out good," human writing may end up displaced by AI writing.
AI clearly has its strengths, too. For experts who have struggled to organize their thoughts into writing, AI is a genuinely powerful tool. For those for whom merely generating text was a towering wall, it is a tremendous help—so I could never tell anyone not to use it. If anything, what we need now is clear guidance on how to use it well.
The Right Way to Use AI
Here is the approach I'd suggest. When writing with AI, you should first organize your own thoughts and experiences, then use AI purely as an amplifier. The 'three principles of writing with AI' I propose are these. First, clearly define your own area of expertise. Second, use AI only in the process of rendering it into text. Third, never pass off as your own something you don't actually know but had AI produce. As this process accumulates, the tacit knowledge that lived only in your head is converted into explicit knowledge.
Clarify your area of expertise → voice your thoughts via STT → organize the document with AI
What an Author Is in This New Era
In the AI era, an author is not someone who writes well. An author is someone who lends credibility to the book published under their name and vouches for its contents. The purpose of publishing has shifted, too. Systematizing one's expertise has become more important than royalty income. A book is now a tool—an authoritative medium through which one organizes and makes known one's own expertise.
At Libretto, we see the heart of authorship in the AI era as responsibility—the resolve to take ownership and send something out into the world with integrity. The person who holds that resolve will remain an author in the years to come. To become a true author, one must carry this sense of responsibility.
