Vincenzo Latronico: I do have anxiety about AI replacing translators, cover artists, line editors, but this is not a problem of AI. This is a problem of cost cutting strategies in management. The problem is not AI. The problem is management.
Lauren Oyler: Just, like, on a conceptual level, I think thinking about AI and media theory in general is much more interesting than thinking about Sally Rooney’s novels. But I think a lot of people who talk about AI, particularly in the literary world, do not understand anything about it. So the conversation is pretty siloed, or it hits a dead end quite quickly.
This is not my argument, but this is the common argument, that literary fiction will become like opera, or a sort of niche cultural interest that only the very well educated or particularly interested people take part in. I can’t worry about it that much, because I have to keep working!
Sometimes I do panic, and I’m like, “Oh no, I’m finally doing exactly what I want to do, and now it’s all going to blow up in a robot orgy or whatever.” But I just don’t worry about it that much, because there’s nothing you can do, right? There’s really nothing you can do, to be honest, and I would rather worry about, like, boys. There’s nothing you can do about boys either, but at least you can feel like you’re doing something about it.
Joelle Owusu: I can’t speak on behalf of Penguin, but personally, just because I’m a Black woman and I work in publishing, and there are so few Black people in senior positions like I’m in, I can’t ignore the fact that a lot of these AI conversations, and who’s called out for allegedly using AI, are mostly Black and brown people. It’s just so hard to tell if it’s true or not, or the extent that it’s been used, or whether it hasn’t been used. And it’s so hard to disprove, because once it’s out there that someone has doubted that you’ve written this, you are tarnished, whether it’s true or not, which is really hard mentally for so many writers who’ve spent years perfecting their craft and writing this book. So I really feel for authors, especially authors of color, because there’s now this extra obstacle they’re now going to have to consider, where anyone, with no real evidence, can say “Let me just see if it’s AI or not.”
