Something you may not know about me is that I double majored in English and marketing in college. Beyond the countless group projects and hours using Excel and PowerPoint, being a marketing major also meant creating theoretical advertising campaigns for real products and businesses. It was in one of these classes that I realized that I absolutely did not want to work in advertising.
There was one assignment that was the tipping point: we were tasked with creating a campaign to convince environmentally-conscious consumers to increase their paper towel usage. The campaign needed to reassure American households that convenience was more important than sustainability, and that people shouldn’t hesitate or feel guilty about using as many paper towels as they wanted to. When a few students balked, saying that it was unethical to convince people to stop caring about the environment, our professor replied that this was the type of work we could expect in the real world. After all, the environment doesn’t have an advertising budget.
I’ve been reminded of my college advertising classes recently with the full-frontal assault of AI. It seems as if every week a different company announces a new AI integration that promises to make my life more convenient. And surprisingly, many people seem ready to argue AI’s case to me pro-bono. I’ve been told that AI is inevitable, that if I don’t use it now I’ll be behind later, or that I should be happy because developmental editors like me will become more valuable in the age of AI. After all, someone will need to review all of that conveniently-produced text to make sure it sounds human!
Never mind the environmental impact, or the fact that tech companies trained AI models on copyrighted material, or that humans are being told they must adapt to something that purports to help and support us.
Like every other industry, publishing is not exempt from AI’s siren song. And while I can understand why it might be tempting to consider how many books and audiobooks AI could write, illustrate, or narrate for a fraction of the cost of human creators, I also know that AI doesn’t buy the books that it promises to so cheaply produce, and that those cost savings come at the expense of humans. Human illustrators, human authors, human designers, human editors, human book narrators, human publishers.
And while I chose a career in publishing because I loved books and words, I have stayed in publishing because I love working with humans. I love helping human writers and human illustrators unlock their stories, elevate their crafts, and hone their pitches. I love being surprised by a human author’s brilliant revisions and unexpected characters. I love seeing the way a human illustrator captures a character’s emotion or the atmosphere of a story. I love celebrating good news and empathizing over tough news with the humans that work so hard to bring every page of every book to life.
So for my part, I’m not buying into AI’s advertising campaign. I don’t believe that using generative AI is an inevitable part of the real world, or that it can ever replace human thought, human emotion, or human creativity. Despite generative AI’s massive advertising budget and promises of convenience, my hope is that publishing will continue to prioritize human creators over a technology that can only hope to imitate their work.
Your Editor Friend,
Julie