How many of us today are doing our job in the same way it was done late last century? More importantly, how many of us today are doing jobs that even existed last century?
“This Year’s CES Will Totally Be All AI, All the Time.”
That’s according to an opinion piece over at LifeWire, where Charlie Sorrel last week advised, as if we needed telling, that AI might pop up here and there at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, which is live now and runs January 9-12.
It’s the kind of place I would not be seen dead in. I still struggle to find the flashlight on my mobile phone, and I have to ask the kids at nursery school to adjust volume or ringtones. I think Fred Flintstone was its previous owner. I use it for making calls, for the very occasional text message, and for the Kindle app, which is the sole reason I need or want a smartphone.
But fortunately for me, my job as a publishing industry observer and analyst doesn’t require hands-on familiarity with every new tech development, any more than being a good driver means knowing the mysteries of the internal combustion engine, or a connoisseur of art needs to be good with a paintbrush and easel.
So I’m glued to the CES reportage this year, when the local internet lets me, for anything that might directly or indirectly impact the publishing industry, because, per Charlie Sorrel’s headline, CES this year is “totally” about AI. But so far (the event finishes Jan 12) you’d be hard-pressed to find much mention of publishing (although kudos to Kaleeg Hainsworth and the Legible team for being there!).
And there’s a reason for that, that many in the publishing industry seem not to grasp.
Let me whisper this quietly: AI, generative or otherwise, is not actually about the publishing industry. In fact, AI barely knows we exist, and cares even less.
The bigger picture
I’ll maybe return to the CES event itself once it’s all wrapped up and there’s enough reportage written up to take a deep dive, and later in this post there’s a couple of quickie items. But here to address the bigger picture.
This past fifteen months I’ve seen authors, artists, translators, editors and publishers running about like headless chickens screaming the sky is falling, convinced AI is coming for their jobs, their families and their pet dog. And that it is going to destroy civilisation as we know it (because as we all know, civilisation didn’t exist until publishers came along).
They are convinced the AI bullet has “publishing industry” written on it, and they alone, among all the world’s people and all the world’s industries, have been singled out for extinction by this new techno-menace.
We so love to play the victim card!
And this is precisely why everyone in the publishing industry should be watching the CES reportage closely. And why they should be looking more closely at all their non-publishing activities and interests. Because pretty much everything we do, hear and see is already being heavily influenced by AI, in just about every field imaginable
It’s the first week of 2024 and we’d have to be a monk living in a cave on a desert island not to have AI working its magic for us each day, without our even realising it.
And we’re still in the early hours of AI Day One.
From Business Insider: “AI is saving sales professionals more than two hours of work each day.”
No, this wasn’t specifically about publishing sales people. And yes, that will be Business Insider as owned by Axell Springer, which recently signed a deal with OpenAI to lawfully train and use its content.
In my second life as a teacher, I’m constantly having to reassure education sector people that the AI bullet does not have their name on it either.
Articles like this, from a teacher in Ireland help to allay their irrational fears:
“I’m a high school math and science teacher who uses ChatGPT, and it’s made my job much easier.”
There’s an endless list. But not all fears are irrational.
Yes, jobs will go. No question.
So what else is new?
How many of us today are doing our job in the same way it was done late last century? Or even a decade ago?
More importantly, how many of us today are doing jobs that even existed last century? And for a certain group within publishing, how many are doing jobs that existed even ten years ago?
About that audiobook boom…
Yes, audiobook narrators, I’m looking at you, among others.
Audiobook narration has been a sideshow for the industry for most of the time audiobooks have existed (1932, since you ask). Audiobooks were not on any publishers’ lists of priorities. Only the blind read them, and if you were blind you probably weren’t working so couldn’t afford them anyway.
As BookBeat CEO Niclas Sandin said, “No market survey said anyone wanted audiobooks.“
And I’m sure back when Johannes Gutenberg was tinkering with his first printing press, his neighbours were standing at the fence saying, “Johannes, what are you doing with this craziness? No market survey ever said anyone wanted printed books!” And another would pipe up, “Johannes, think about all the quill makers and parchment makers and scribes you will put out of work. Be a good Luddite and smash that machine to pieces right now.“
Back in the 1930s, less than a century ago, audiobooks came on vinyl. And maybe even on shellac 78 RPM disks, as music did way back in pre-history. Then came cassettes in the 1960s and CDs in the 1980s.
Digital audiobooks came along in the 1990s, with Audible among the first-movers, but you downloaded the audiobook to your PC. The iPod, effectively the first mobile digital audio device, that freed us from lugging about cumbersome cassettes or CDs, would not exist until this century. It launched in October 2001, shocking consumers with its size and weight and the hitherto unimaginable possibility of storing 1,000 songs!
The first iPod weighed 6 ounces, about the same as the iPhone 13 today, and had a then beyond incredible 5GB storage. The iPhone Max today has a top storage of 1TB.
The iPod ceased production in 2022. I’m sure we all remember how sad we were that all those iPod factory workers were out of a job, and how we all vowed to protest, demand changes in the law, take Apple to court for crimes against humanity, and generally acted like we cared.
No, hold on, we all collectively shrugged, said “Who gives a f**k so long as it’s not my job”, and got on with our lives. These people only had a job because of the iPod, and now it’s time to move on. Find another job. Retrain for another career. Who are these dinosaurs who think jobs are for life?
Oh yeah, that’s us. The publishing industry.
But with the arrival of meaningfully-sized mobile devices, digital audio took off. Suddenly we have an audiobook boom and tons of new jobs are being created for narrators.
This graphic from Statista, showing audiobook production in the US between 2007-2021, gives an idea of the scale of change in the audiobook narration job market.
Put simply, there was almost no work for narrators in 2007, and many people who now call themselves narrators probably had never even considered the idea back before 2010.
This Nielsen graphic for the UK, over a shorter period, just 2014-21, tells a similar story. The audiobook market was rapidly expanding and publishers were struggling to meet demand. Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!
So out of nowhere, new jobs suddenly materialised. And how we rejoiced! More narrators were needed. And more translators. And of course authors and publishers were taking full advantage. New jobs were being created in audio studios, and more jobs in distribution. Entire new platforms were being created around digital audio that simply could never have existed twenty years ago.
But how did all this come about?
Technological evolution
Because of technological evolution. And because the industry was willing, reluctantly, to change.
Now we’re all screaming foul because technological change is threatening those same jobs that mostly did not exist ten years ago, and certainly did not come with lifetime guarantees.
Not all jobs will go. The publishing apocalypse being touted by the Luddite fringe is just knee-jerk nonsense. Publishing will change, adapt and grow in new ways. Just as it changed with, adapted to, and delivered the audiobook market that exists today.
In fact, the audio market will just get bigger and better, assisted by the very AI the Luddite fringe are resisting. And the more adaptable among the narrators, translators, production crews and authors and publishers will move with the times and emerge stronger for the change.
Not convinced?
Ask yourself, what happened to all those office secretaries that used to bash away at typewriters all day? Has anyone even seen a typewriter this century, except in a museum? They moved with the times. They learned MS Word and Excel and whatever, increased their skills set and their employability, and they moved with the times, or moved to another career.
Right now the smart guys and gals in the publishing industry are asking themselves, how can AI benefit my career. They are taking courses, reading everything they can, writing and refining their prompting skills, and having great fun while they do it.
But there are also some very smart people out who are way ahead of the game. Who realise that what’s happening is not just another digital valued-added bolt-on, like AR or VR or NFTs or cryptocurrency, but that AI is truly transformational.
Let me single out here Nadim Sadek, who featured in my recent TNPS op-ed, and Thad McIlroy who didn’t (blame The Bookseller!), as must-follows if you want to hear reasoned and rational arguments about how AI is affecting our very own publishing industry, and why we need to seize the opportunity, not fight it tooth and nail.
We’re just the sideshow
But per the headline for this op-ed, AI is not about us. It is not about the publishing industry. We are just a sideshow.
And we need to understand that, when we make our irrational rants against AI, we are not just selfishly saying that our jobs are more important than anyone else’s. We are saying that we really don’t have a clue about what AI is, because we are already using it every day, and we are certainly going to be taking full advantage of it in the future, with absolutely no regard for how many jobs it costs anyone not in our own “special” industry.
At CES already we’ve seen a “Bespoke AI All-In-One Laundry Combo“, a new washer-dryer combo that skips the need to transfer laundry from one drum to the other. Nice, but what’s really special is that, per USA Today, it uses AI to “optimise everything from washing and drying time to detergent amount used, based on your habits and the type of load.”
Or how about the “Bespoke AI Induction Slide-in Range.”
“The oven features an internal camera, which pipes video onto your smartphone via the SmartThings app, so that you can check on your food without opening the door. It can also be used to create time-lapse cooking videos. It also gives you smart notifications on the status of your cooking project and responds to voice commands.”
Smart refrigerators, robot cleaners, smart dog collars… the list is endless. You name it, it’s powered by AI at some level, and this year, 2024, promises to be the year when things get serious.
Well, not for me. Here in The Gambia, the height of my cooking tech is a gas bottle and hob, because I cannot, no matter how I try, get charcoal to burn. My washing machine is a bowl of water and a scrubbing board. Yet my neighbours will be washing their clothes with a scrubbing board and cooking over a charcoal or wood fire, while bopping away to the latest tunes on their smartphones. AI is everywhere, make no mistake.
But there was one really major news item to emerge from CES that does pertain to our very own publishing industry, which is all we care about. Or are you going to tell me you will never own a smart TV, or a smart cooker or a – oops! – a smartphone?
SAG-AFTRA signs an AI deal
Remember back in the summer, how we in the publishing industry stood in solidarity with out semi-colleagues in the acting industry, united in our complete and utter resistance to all things AI?
The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and AI voice tech company Replica Studios have just struck a deal, announced at CES, whereby Replica will licence digital replicas of actors voices for use in, for example, computer video games.
Another dam broken. Resistance is indeed futile.
What matters now is how the actors and other Hollywood peoples affected, further rise to the opportunity of AI, instead of doing the knee-jerk waltz.
News publishers are of course already on track, with both Associated Press and Axell-Springer having signed deals with OpenAI. Many more will follow, and most likely that will include the New York Times, currently using a law suit to pressure the AI folks into a better deal.
Book publishers, as usual, are behind the curve.
But early days.
The Luddite fringe is determined to muddy the waters by screaming that the sky is falling and that AI is stealing our jobs, while simultaneously saying AI is so dreadfully bad it can never compete with humans. (Being able to juggle contradictory ideas is de rigueur if you want to be a Luddite.)
Sorting the wheat from the chaff
2024 will start to sort the wheat from the chaff.
We are in what, a few years ago, we were going to call the Internet of Things, moving towards the Internet of Everything. Those terms seem to have fallen by the wayside as the media realised the scaremongering potential of just two letters, AI, embodied by HAL 2000, I Robot and M3GAN, among many narratives that have tapped into our primordial fear of change.
2024 and the coming few years won’t be comfortable for everyone, and yes, jobs will go in the publishing industry, be certain of that. But new jobs and new opportunities will be created, and life will go on, bigger and better than ever, driven by AI.
To those who say they cannot adapt, ask yourself how you are even reading this post, with not a smudge of ink or a sheet of paper in sight. The fact is, you’ve already changed. We all have. We’ve adjusted, adapted and eventually come to love and rely on the very things we not long ago found so scary and for so long resisted.
The sooner we realise that business as usual is not an option, the sooner we can move on, and embrace the opportunities unfolding.
Beware The Future. It’s Already here.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Pulse newsletter.
