Publishing in the Age of AI
As artificial intelligence establishes itself as a primary tool for content creation, it's driving sweeping change across the publishing industry. The number of publishing professionals using AI in their day-to-day work has grown sharply. It's rarely advertised openly, but using AI is now an open secret in the industry — and publishing finds itself in a landscape where the boundaries of copyright are growing increasingly blurry.
The Shifting Meaning of "Author"
Traditionally, an author was someone who shaped their own thoughts and experiences into writing and delivered them to readers. There was a time when only people with real writing chops could become authors — an era when the prevailing assumption was that only those with a gift for prose could be authors.
But as publishing has expanded and more people have put out books, the definition of "author" has steadily broadened. At a publisher like ours, which focuses mainly on practical, business, and self-help titles, more than 85% of our authors are not professional writers. That's arguably to be expected — the people who've achieved standout success in their own fields are often people for whom writing isn't a natural fit.
Drawing content out of these authors has always been one of the hardest parts of the job. On our YouTube channel, Learning Shares (배워보소서), we've shared methods proven out in real publishing projects: techniques for gathering ideas, sorting material into categories using sticky notes, and converting spoken thoughts into text via speech-to-text tools. The goal was always the same — to find some way of pulling the author's tacit knowledge out of their head and turning it into explicit, written form.
How AI Has Changed Writing
Now we've entered an era where AI can write the text itself. But after reviewing thousands of manuscripts over the past decade, I can say that AI-generated proposals and manuscripts have a distinct smell to them. Any reader who reads widely can usually tell the difference. Just as AI-generated images or video carry a faint but unmistakable uncanniness, AI-generated prose triggers the same kind of resistance in a reader. And yet, looking at online news articles today, the number of journalists writing with AI keeps climbing — which makes me genuinely worried that, as the old saying goes, "bad money drives out good," and human writing could end up crowded out by AI writing.
AI clearly has real strengths, too. For experts who've always struggled to get their thinking down on paper, it's a genuinely powerful tool. For people who found the simple act of producing text to be a wall they couldn't get over, AI is a real help — so I would never say people shouldn't use it. What we need instead is clear guidance on how to use it.
The Right Way to Use AI
Here's what I'd propose. When writing with AI, authors should first work out their own thinking and experience, and use AI only as an amplifier. I call this the "Three Principles of AI Writing." First, clearly define your own area of expertise. Second, bring in AI only at the stage of turning that expertise into text. Third, never let AI generate something you don't actually know and pass it off as your own. Build up enough of this process, and the tacit knowledge that once lived only in your head gets converted into real, explicit knowledge.
Clarify your expertise → voice your thinking via speech-to-text → use AI to organize it into a document
What It Means to Be an Author in This New Era
In the age of AI, the author is no longer the person who writes well. They are the person who lends credibility to the book that carries their name and vouches for what's inside it. The purpose of publishing itself has shifted, too — royalty income now matters less than systematizing one's expertise. A book has become a tool for organizing and broadcasting one's expertise through a medium that still carries real authority.
At Libretto, we see "responsibility" as the core of what it means to be an author in the AI era — the conviction that you stand behind your work and put it into the world in a way people can trust. Whoever carries that conviction will be the author of the future. Becoming a true author, going forward, will mean carrying that sense of responsibility.
