The AI debate

YOU WILL not, I hope, be surprised to hear that as an ex-journalist I am a fervent believer in free speech. If you think that what I write is a load of nonsense you should be free to say so.  And I should be free to disagree.

The resolution of our dispute can only be provided by one or the other of us providing an argument, based on facts and consisting of conclusions drawn therefrom, that is stronger than the opponents’.

My problem with the debate about AI is that it is veering very close to becoming a distortion of this process. I came to this conclusion after reading anarticle in the Daily Telegraph last month dealing with the debate (or lack of one) around the use of AI in book publishing.

The spark that ignited this particular bushfire was the insistence by romance author Jessica Gadziala that her publishers include a page in the front of her book(s) to the effect that she had not used “any AI in the writing of this book”. Fair enough. She then added “the author believes genAI can go f*ck itself”.

If you will bear with me, I would like to use my own life in the publishing industry to illustrate why I think Ms Gadziala is misguided.

When I started as a cub reporter in the 1960s, I was not required to write stories out in longhand, I was given the latest technology of the time – a manual typewriter, sheets of cut-up newsprint and some carbon paper to capture a copy of every word.  Mistakes were XXXed out and the resultant mess was sent through to the sub-editors, who did the work of preparing the “copy” (newspaper speak for words on paper) for the type-setting department with nothing more advanced than a ballpoint pen.

Fast forward to the middle of the next decade, which found me running a small magazine publishing company.  Now my copy was produced on an electric IBM golf-ball typewriter, and the typesetter at the company that did the “repro” work prior to handing plates to the printers no longer produced “slugs” of hot lead: her work was captured on photographic paper, cut up by the lay-out artist in place of the compositor, which made everything quicker and simpler.

It was a similar story with the pictures that accompanied the articles. In my newspaper days this involced a photo-lithographer, who had undergone a years-long apprenticeship to equip with the knowledge required to turn a photograph on film into a metal image, basically using acid to etch the metal where required. Colour photography was all but impossible.

By the time I was in the magazine business, full-colour printing was much easier, much quicker and less expensive, thanks to technical advances in the separation of a colours into their cyan, magenta, yellow and black components (which is why the relevant software on your computer offers you CMYK as an alternative to RGB technology).

However, someone still had to carry the photos, the resultant films, the plates from the dark room to the printing department. By contrast, now I can send a book chapter back to one of our authors for revision by the simple act of pressing “send”.

I am sure there are other industries where technology has advanced as quickly, and been the cause of so much upheaval as the publishing industry. Yes, people have lost their jobs, which is never pleasant, but on the whole technology has been transformational for publishing.

Artificial Intelligence is simply transformation writ large. Yes, it is in its childhood as a technology, and, yes, it needs human oversight. But if it’s used sensibly, I cannot see why there has been this hysteria around its use in story-telling.

Publishing house Hachette cancelled Mia Ballard’s (originally self-published) book “Shy Girl” because she was accused on using AI. It’s a horror story, not an entrant for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Surely the only judgement to be made aboiut it is whether it pleases the reader. So, does it really matter whether the author used AI to help with the plot?

Back to the charming Ms Gadziala: she is quoted in the Daily Telegraph piece as saying she had sweated over the story for 30 years and she wanted people to know it was all her own work. The truth is that her first book was published in 2015, and since then she has published “more than a hundred works” , which is an impressive rate of one every six weeks. They must type “real fast” in New Jersey.

Richard Lyon

May 2026