The Generative AI Era and the Changing Role of the Author
Now that generative AI can spin up any story you ask of it, and now that AI has woven itself this deeply into daily life, I find myself rethinking what an author actually is.
Going forward, an author is no longer simply someone who writes. The author is the final authority—the person who, within their own field of expertise, can vet and sign off on writing that AI has generated.
Work in publishing long enough and you encounter every kind of text imaginable, and yes, you lean on AI for help. Look at the recent trend and writing with AI has become genuinely routine, genuinely mainstream. Publishing is no exception—we may not advertise it, but we use AI a great deal. Ours is a business of words, after all, and an LLM is simply too useful a tool to leave on the shelf. Which is why I'd say our industry now stands right on the blurred line where the very notion of copyright starts to dissolve.
The Limits of the Traditional Idea of an Author
One thing I've felt throughout my years in publishing is that the strength of the content ultimately determines the strength of the author. Content is a reflection of the author—it reveals their intellectual depth and the values they pursue.
Traditionally, the author's job was to convert knowledge into prose and deliver it. To get your experience down on the page, you had to teach yourself how to write, and the people who could do that became authors without much trouble. So in fields like literature, the essay, and poetry, only those with so-called writing chops could easily climb into the ranks of "author." It was a structure in which only people who could produce compelling prose were recognized as writers.
But as self-publishing, e-publishing, and the like made it easy for far more people to publish, the definition of an author widened. And as the formats competing with the book multiplied, the term stretched wider still—to the "creator."
In our corner of the business—practical guides, business and economics titles, self-help—many of our authors aren't professional writers at all. And that makes sense: the successful people who are blazing their own trail in their own league are often the ones with no particular connection to writing.
Change on the Ground in Publishing, and the Arrival of AI
That's exactly why, as a strategist and an editor-in-chief, helping authors actually produce content was such hard work. I'd walk authors through things like how to gather ideas, or how to sort those ideas into categories using sticky notes.
Now that we've entered an era where AI can generate the writing itself, a notion has taken hold: just have AI churn out the text and you're done. But a proposal or a piece of writing made by AI—I can spot it on sight. And I suspect any reader who reads widely would recoil at it too, the same uneasy feeling you get looking at an AI-generated image or video.
Using AI the Right Way
And yet AI isn't all downside. For authors and experts who have always struggled to organize their thoughts into writing and get them onto the page, generating text with AI is an enormous help.
So here's what I want to tell you. When you use AI to generate writing, first organize your own thinking, then use AI as an amplifier for it. Don't have AI conjure up material you never knew and never had, and then pass it off as your own. Instead, take your own area of expertise, marshal it, put it in order, and use AI in the process of getting it down as text. Do that, and your content becomes organized prose. What lived only in your head—your tacit knowledge becomes explicit knowledge, brought into being through the tool we call AI.
What Publishing Now Means, and the Author's Role
Publishing is no longer about selling a lot of copies and collecting royalties. Publishing has become a credible medium through which you take the expertise you hold, organize it systematically in the form of a book, and turn it into a structured product. And the author, from here on, is not the person who writes beautifully, but the person who lends trust to the book that carries their name.
In the end, when you use AI to generate your content, you must always keep one thing in mind: that you are putting it out into the world under your own responsibility, and with your own credibility behind it.
