Moving Beyond the Hype/Doom Cycles of Generative AI Discourse in Publishing

Generative AI has become a buzzword within the publishing industry over the last two years, with responses often falling into either high optimism or an overall sense of doom. We are now at a suitable distance from the launch of ChatGPT to appraise these developments from a more nuanced perspective and begin to explore their connections to the longer history of AI. In this article, I offer some suggestions for how publishers might approach this topic. With the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022, ‘Generative AI’ has been heralded as one of the most significant technological breakthroughs since the printing press. Cutting through the hyperbole and the numerous possible counterexamples, the comparison is useful. The transition from manuscript to print culture was an on-going process rather than a sharp shift and we have not stopped prizing forms of manuscript writing centuries later. One mode of communication does not completely displace another; there’s little signs that generative AI will eradicate our need and desire for human creativity in fields such as publishing.