Transcripts For CSPAN2 About 20240704 : vimarsana.com

Out a few years ago that said 14 of social media users drive the debate and our full coverage of thend booktv. Org. Festival of books at just click on the book fairs and festivals tab or search joel pollak. On about books, we delve into the latest news about the Publishing Industry with interesting insider interviews with Publishing Industry experts. Well also give you updates on current nonfiction authors and books, the latest book reviews, and is well talk about the current nonfiction books featured on cspans book tv. Welcome to about books. Now in a few minutes, well take a look at how Artificial Intelligence science might affect publishing and the writing of books. But first, heres some of the latest from the publishing world. Former president barack obama released a statement in support of libraries fighting book bans. In his letter posted online, he said in part that, quote, books have always shaped how i experience the world today. Some of the books that shaped my life are being challenged by people who disagree with certain ideas or perspectives. I believe such an approach is profoundly misguided and contrary to what has made this country great. Well, the National Review pushed back on president obamas letter saying that, quote, when one digs into the controversies that havenspired obamas missive, one quickly discovers that it is not so much that ideas and perspectives are being suppressed in america as that age. Inappropriate material is being removed from its schools and in some cases from the children. Sections of public libraries. In other news, layoffs and voluntary buyouts have begun at Penguin Random house. According to Publishers Weekly ceo nihar malviya confirmed that long rumored layoffs have become a reality. Quote as you know, the book marketace h had several shifts over the past years. The Penguin Random house ceo wrote to employees, we, too, have experienced these shifts and changes. Especially during the last month. We a halfway through 2023. Anwhile the bk market has grown, particularly over recent years, we havelso faced significant increased cost in all areas across the board. And we expect these increases as well. And inflation to continue. Well, approximately 49 of those eligible for a buyout have accepted it at Penguin Random house, including editors who have worked with authors such as robert caro, steven pinker, Elizabeth Gilbert and ray kurzweil, and Publishers Weekly also reports that book sales were down nearly 3 in the first half of 2023, from 363 million books sold in the first six months. Of 2022 to 354 million sold. So far this year. Publishers weekly writes that, quote, the boost provided by prince harry spare made by orthography, autobiography, memoir is onof the only three adult nonfiction subs categories to have a sales increase in the first six months. Travel had the largest increase, up 6. 6 . The two categories most closely associated with stay at home activities during the pandemic, had the largest declines as sales of home gardening books dropped 17 and a half percent and sales of cooking entertaining titles fell 15. 4 . And finally, in publishing news, simon and schuster is releasing a new memoir by kassidy hutchinson, the former special assistant to president trump. She was a key witness for the House Select Committee to investigate the january six attack on the u. S. Capitol. The books title, enough yet set to be released in september. Simon and schuster said that her memoir, hutchinson reveals the struggle between the pressures she confronted to toe the party line and the demands of the oath she swore to defend american democracy. Enough reaches far beyond the typical insider political account. And now on about books, a conversation with thad mcilroy, a publishing consultant about Artificial Intelligence and its potential impact on publishing. Well said. Mcelroy is a publishing analyst and consultant. Recently, mr. Mcelroy for Publishers Weekly. You wrote an article that was entitled Artificial Intelligence is about to turn Book Publishing upside down. What are you positing here. That articles been fun. Ive heard a tremendous amount of response to it. Ive been pondering, like all of us, whats going on with this chatbot stuff. And of course, with my background in Book Publishing, it was trying to put those connect the dots, lets say, on that. And when i connected the dots, i thought, gosh, this could be an enormous change in the industry that i worked in for decades. And so i tried to push out there some of the ways in which it could affect all kinds of different aspects of the book Publishing Industry. So when were talking about gpt, were talking about general tive pretrained, trans performers. What exactly are those and how would they affect the book industry if somehow we get into the vocabulary youll hear about elsewhere smart language models, as you just described. Now we hear about generative ai and all of those are very variations on a theme for people who arent familiar with it. Its you come up with a pretty straight forward basic, nonscientific, kind of explanation at essentially a large database of language that when its such a large data base, that when you post simple english questions to it, it is able to emulate a authentic sounding human response. And of course, you know, if there wasnt a heck of a lot of data in there, that response would just be stupid. It would not make any sense whatsoever. The database is deep enough that it comes up with very realistic, reasonable kinds of responses with surprising accuracy and surprising depth of detail. And it can pause it responses because of the size of the database. And so when you work with chatty beauty, you start to think this is a device thats humanlike. Thats in response to me. And it does that most of the time. What you hear about all the time, of course, is its socalled hallucinations, because it is really only trying to emulate language. Its not releasing information per say. And so when it emulates language, sometimes it makes stuff up. So, mr. Mcelroy, can we say that in the future, Artificial Intelligence will be writing books . I it is doing so now. Theyre not very good, but i think they will be very, very good books, both fiction and nonfiction, created with Artificial Intelligence. Im convinced of that. Now, where could if somebody were interested, where could somebody read an ai generated book . The usual book store or amazon, where theres quite a few books. People are the ones that are up there now, are a bit disgusting to me because most of them are sort of get rich quick kinds of books. I dont necessarily recommend and you can read free samples. Maybe thats the way to do it. I wouldnt recommend spending money on it, but keep an eye out. Youll start to see some some pretty good nonfiction initially and then some pretty fascinating. Some nonfiction mostly, i think fantasy and romance, that kind of thing will be very suited to the technology of cheap. And so if youre an author and you want to write a book about fantasy and dragons, what would you how would you program that . Would you would what would you say to the computer or to the gpt . You would it would be like a conversation with a friend and it would be like a friend helping you write a book. Youd start off by saying, okay, djibouti, youre my coauthor, and together were going to work on a book and im going to tell you a little bit about the story, and then youre going to take the story and youre going to expand on the story. I want you to give me 5000 words are my main character named goes into the forest and runs up against a obstacle and that im like that and gpt will iterate back at all kinds of different lengths and you can start to build the story. So in your Publishers Weekly column, you wrote that i believe that every function in trade Book Publishing today can be automated with the help of generative, i. And if this is true, then the trade book Publishing Industry as we know it will soon be obsolete. Is that a pessimistic attitude or is that an optimistic attitude . Im a quote, optimist. It might is when you pull it out in that kind of context, it sounds dire and like a dreadful threat to the industry. I think that were i work in an industry thats very much bound by tradition, by bit set of expectations. I suppose most industries are publishing, you know, has that aura of antic, witty and is darn proud of it at times. And i think its an industry that would be more robust with the full use of technology that we can get more voices, better voices, more readers using this kind of technology. I think thats a great thing. So besides being a socalled coauthor as you discussed earlier, how else would Artificial Intelligence change the Publishing Industry . In the article, i looked at all kinds of aspects of it. Id work in different parts of publishing through my career. So ive ive worked in editorial, ive worked as an author. Ive got a number of books, publishing of fiction, but lots of nonfiction. Ive worked in production and printing of books, all of that kind of thing. Ive worked in marketing of books, and so i consider each of those publishing areas and each of those functions are essential and need to be executed as robustly as each other. Each of them is very amenable to different aspects of the power of the generator by some a little bit less so than others, but i was able to, you know, look at them each sort of in a sequential way and think, yeah, itll touch that. Yeah, that one. It wont touch as much. This one. Oh goodness. Its going to completely a read which read redo how were going to look at our simple editorial functions. Well, lets talk about the production of a book. How would i affect that . Well, the production, i think of as sort of its a multistage process within what we call production. But lets assume that the manual script has been fully edited. Weve got the final words that we want to publish. So at that point, were going into a typesetting phase, were going into a design phase, both the internal parts of the book and the cover, of course, of the book. If the book is illustrated, then we have to create a lot of illustrations for the book. When all of that is done, we go to a printing files that are ready for the Printing Press. Then we go to printed plates and punch the Printing Press. All of those stages at the designed typesetting production phase. Each one of them can be accelerated and enhanced by a i. Weve seen what it can do with images, so cover design is a no brainer even today with with the current state of the technology, thats only going to get better. The interior design of the book very, very simple to do with the help of i. Those are some four instances when it comes to distribution and advertise. And you write in your Publishers Weekly article for the Publishing Industry online distribution and advertising have separated writers from readers. What does that mean . Yeah, this was something that said this ones close to my heart. You know, im im a writer. Im a reader. And ive always been frustrated and a little bit dismayed, lets say, by the role, for example, i mean, amazon gets attacked a lot, and i think theres much to criticize. Disney that is on its time. Its brought a lot of books to a lot of people, but some very good prices. But what it does in that act of bringing books to people is, as they say, disinterred media. Its between the reader and the writer and you can see that, you know, readers are very passionate when they come up against your good book and they fall in love with an author and the authors work. And then but in between them sits amazon. In many cases when when its a bookstore that sits in between them, thats, i think, a very good thing because theres a Human Interaction between the two. Its not disintermediated. Theres accelerated and enhanced by those kind of personal relationships. So what i want to see what i hope to see, what i expect to see, which is new ways for writers to get to their readers and to communicate and to find and enhance those relationships and vice versa for readers to find them. Even more books, even better books in their finding today when it comes to authorship, can an author claim to have written a book thats been coauthored by generative by gpt. That one. So thats the Million Dollar question and were going to see a lot of controversy. Were starting to see it already. Were going to see that. I think its going to play out through the courts eventually. Theres going to be a lot of litigation around that. You know, if we take out the legal aspect of it, i can tell you that ive used to t to help with my writing. I could tell you that ive created this whole chapter solely with you and then check it myself to confirm that its what i wanted. So it can be my coauthor later. Allie technically speaking today, whether or not i have to disclose those that to the publisher, does the publisher have to disclose that to the public . What are the good kind of moral and legal responsibilities for that . I think thats going to be determined over the months and years. I suppose so. Thad mcilroy you use the example of of cars in your Publishers Weekly column, is it safe to say that weve become lazy, dry verbs in the sense that we have power steering and power brakes and in some other features in our cars now that we didnt used to have and writers can become lazy because they will have. I helping them. Its a good question and its one that, you know, reasonable question and a lot of people are asking and in one scenario, that would be part of this. I dont think so. I think that people, writers are, you know, by nature, theyre creative. They want to do the best they can possibly do for their own, you know, for their own pride and professionalism. And also because they want to reach readers. And so i think that is not something that gets in the way or questions that process is something that enhances it. I can be a better writer. I can do more research. It can help me with my ability to express thoughts and ideas and creative ones or very literal ones so it doesnt make us lazy. I think its a tool that makes us stronger, more robust. Thad mcilroy how is jpt . How is it programed . Where is it getting the information . Lets say were writing a book about the 2020 president ial election and were using ai to help us with that. Where is that information coming from . Thats a tough question because it is. Ill try and keep it sort of basic. One of the aspects of the current generation of t is that the language that the information thats taught, the words that has been trained on up to now, you know, they cut off around what was a 2021 depending on the language model. They cut off a certain number of years. They continue to add to that socalled corpus of knowledge of information. And so something is happening at the same time that youre adding words to the database. Those words convey meaning in their taken from web pages, from Wikipedia Pages and so those words are both, you know, individual, you know, units of text, but theyre also conveying information. They contain information. And so, you know, as beatty moves forward, were going to see more and more current information, indepth information. And some of thats going to be trained on books. Thats one of the current controversies, is that some of gpt is actually trained on books that have been published, some of them, many of those books are in the socalled public domain. Theyre outside of copyright others, as it turned out in the current corpus, have been books that are in copyright and thats causing a lot of controversy. So were seeing this already. Were seeing the use of ai, gpt, etc. When it comes to education. And is that correct . And students use in using this, whats the danger there . Education is probably the most profound use case at this point. I was talking the other day with one of my colleagues who works as it has worked in educational publishing. And as we began to, you know, go back and forth on what some of the possibilities are, you start to think, okay, a book of instruction can be customized to the particular or knowledge of the individual reader. You no longer have to have one textbook for, you know, the grade nine level. What you can have is a different textbook for every certain, every Single Person in the class. Youre seeing some of the Online Education and programs are existing systems starting to use cbt and using it very effectively for 1 to 1 kind of tutoring. You can see disintegration of the textbook as a form, as the information becomes totally online and individualize to the student. So there it seems like in the short term well have some bigger impact. Thad mcilroy roy, one of the Fastest Growing parts of the book industry, is audio books are we seeing Computer Generated voices reading audio books at this point . We sure are that ive just before the call today, i was reading about a company thats just landed a very large investment and they do have an Artificial Intelligence and they build audio book creation without a human. Narrator some of your listeners will be aware of this as a phenomenon because its a couple of years old where we can clone voices from other people. Theres an instance, a very famous, wellknown instance now where the actor edward harmon, who is no longer with us, his voice is being used to to narrate audio boxes of words under license. Its been a legal use of this voice and sort of revenue to his estate, which is a curious aspect of it. But yeah, the ai is has gone from being a pretty good tool for this to being an excellent tool. A couple of years ago when i first started studying it, you could tell there was still a computer. Today, very easy to convince someone that that voice is a human, that was in the studio reading that book and it was generated very rapidly, very inexpensively with Artificial Intelligence. What is your company . The future of publishing and your website . The future of publishing ecommerce . What do you do . I consult to all kinds of publishers, to authors, to distributors. I work on all of the technical challenges that the industry that the industry faces. Ive been doing that for quite a long time. What fascinates me most is that intersection point between technology and traditional publishing. Do you find reticence when it comes to the publishers or authors and abuse . Take a very silly word, but an ickiness to this. Yeah, yeah. I do. Yes, i talk about that, about publishing as a Tech Knowledge of first industry. Its not merely that the industry is not in the average author is not terribly sophisticated around technology. I think theyre intimidated by it. And that intimidation can become hostility, hence the aversion, an aspect of technology. I didnt wasnt born a technologist. Im in my my entry into publishing was, you know, the love of the creativity of great writing and technology was something that i picked up later on. So i worked for a long time trying to make people more comfortable with the technology is there to help not to hinder. Its not something to walk, but a tool that can make your your work far more effective. But i understand where people who arent comfortable with something with technology, it can be intimidating. Im there to try and help them over the hump on that stuff. You close your publisher weekly column by compare saying i t to the Printing Press and the transformation in the world by the Printing Press. Yes, its so many times when you read about technology, you talk to people about technology in publishing. They try to find a, you know, something that makes it biggest possible. And yet and so theres theres always, you know, this is the biggest transformation since gutenberg and the Printing Press. And usually that is pure hype. And, you know, most of the transformation of the last number of decades, you know, some of them were very good, very useful, but they havent been as big as the transformation of the Printing Press. This one could be. I you know, im not convinced it is. And i recognize thats a big hill to climb to say, my god, you know, as as important as preprinted press, the post Printing Press. Well, id like to contextualize it that way for people to consider that. Yes, indeed, this could be an enormous and if its a nas, what does that mean to the work they do, whether it is as an author or within a publishing company, if it was at that scale, what what would the world look like right after words again . You know, if you consider the impact of print has been, you know, enormously positive impact, some drawbacks, but enormously positive impact, i think its equally possible that this generation of technology could be as profoundly and wonderfully impact for thad mcilroy website is the future of publishing dot com. His Publishers Weekly article Artificial Intelligence is about to turn Book Publishing upside down. Mr. Mcelroy, thanks for spending a few minutes with us to touch on some of the issues that maybe affected by i. My pleasure, peter. Thanks for having me. And this is about books, a programing podcast produced by cspan booktv. Well, each tuesday, dozens of new books are released. Heres a sampling. Child psycholy and author Miriam Grossman is out with her latest lost in translation a child psychic trust guide out of madness. Ms. Grossman ttified at a hearing on capitol hill earlier this summer about her concerns abt gender affirming care and puberty blockers. And dovan ramsey isut with a new book about the crack epidemic and its impact on black americans. Its entitled when crack was king a peoplehistory of a misunderstood era and another new book out is by former investment banr and financial commentator carol roth. Its her latest book, and it warns that global elites are targeting private property ownershiand financial freedom. Its entitled you will own nothing your war wit a new financial wod order andow to fight back and finally, one novel to tell you about. Its by Authors Marie benedict and victoria christopher murray. Its called first ladies and it explores the partnership between Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist mary mcleod bethune. Well, coming up on booktv, its our weekly afterwards program. This week, its Pulitzer Prize winning journalist wesley lowery. On his new book, american white lash a changing nation and the cost of progress. Hes interviewed by columbia universitys jelani cobb. Heres a portion. If our country was founded on an explicitly white supremacist system in that people who were coded under law as white had claim to the full promise of american freedom, while people who were coded as black did not have claim to that promise, which is just the fact of how we were founded, is what it looked like. The that that system, as a white supremacist system, is a system that prioritizes some places above others, people who are coded as white. Weve seen steps over our history to undo that and to create a multiracial democracy. When those steps date back to the revolts of enslaved people, a date to the abolitionist movement, the civil war. I. Emancipation and reconstruction. The date to the Civil Rights Movement in the fifties and sixties. And they date to the steps towards the election of a black president. In each of those incidents, what we see is that as people fight to upend a White Supremacy, a status quo, those were the beneficiaries of that status quo lash out violently in in defense of a system for which they are the beneficiaries. So what we see is the following the revolts of enslaved people, we see massive acts of violence in both interpersonal and in terms of policy cutting down on the ability of enslaved people to have access to reading or to education, their freedom of movement in some cases, quotas on how many new enslaved could be brought to a given colony to make sure that they would not lose an upper hand in terms of maintaining the populations we see, the violence and the backlash to the radical republicans in the south and the overthrow of multiracial democracy as it was established in reconstruction. We see the the violent crackdowns of civil rights and Civil Liberties of black americans following the Civil Rights Era in the Civil Rights Movement. And we see the rise of these white supremacist groups, whether it be the skinheads, whether it be the militia groups, whether it be what we called the alt right for a while. Right. This idea that when white supremacist, when White Supremacy is threatened, people lash out in its defense and in those moments, i think those moments are best understood as a white lash. And a reminder that afterwards airs every sunday night at 10 p. M. Well, thanks for joining us for about books, a program and podcast produced by cspans booktv. You can watch all booktv program games online any time at booktv dot org and you can listen to this program as a podcast. Download it on our cspan. Now app. And youve been watching booktv