The latest generation of AI is a game changer. Not incremental change--something gentle, something gradual: this AI changes everything, fast. Scary fast.

I believe that every function in trade book publishing today can be automated ' with the help of generative AI. And, if this is true, then the trade book publishing industry as we know it will soon be obsolete. We will need to move on.

There are two quick provisos, however. The first is straightforward: this is not just about ChatGPT--or other . GPTs (generative pretrained transformers) and LLMs (large language models). A range of associated technologies and processes can and will be brought into play that augment the functionality of generative AI. But generative AI is the key ingredient. Without it, what I'm describing is impossible.

The second proviso is of a different flavor. When you make absolutist claims about a technology, people will invariably try to defeat you with another absolute. If you claim that one day all cars will be self-driving, someone will point out that this won't apply to Formula One race cars. Point taken.

This isn't about Formula One publishing. I'm going to be talking about "good enough"--about what people will accept, what they'll buy, and what they'll actually read. I'm not going to claim that Formula One publishers won't be able to do a better job than AI on many of the processes described below. But I'll challenge you to consider exactly where the human touch brings sufficient added value to justify the overhead in time and costs.

Does any of this mean that there will be no future for great novels and fine nonfiction studies? Of course it doesn't. That's not my point.

Do I doubt that there will still be fantastic cover designs from talented designers? Of course there will be. We'll still stumble on new books on bookstore shelves and, humbled by the grandeur of their cover designs, declare that there's no way they could have been designed with AI. And sometimes we'll be right.

Antecedents

My reference point is what we lived through with desktop publishing. Many of the people working in publishing today entered the industry after 1985, when the combo of the Macintosh, the laser printer, and desktop publishing software were first deployed. The initial results were not pretty. The type was rough around the edges, and the letter-spacing was crude.

In 1988, when the Macintosh was hooked up to a Linotype machine, the improvement in quality was dramatic. But most traditionalists still argued that the "color" of the type remained poor, and that this lack of quality would be perceived by readers and rejected. The specialists--the designers and their publishing clients--had built careers in part around paying attention to the nuances of specific typefaces, and to kerning, line spacing, and the design of the printed page.

It's not that this became unimportant, or that there was no appreciable difference; it's that the new technologies could produce "good enough" quality--a new concept for measuring publishing output:...