On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway covers a week dominated by AI controversy: Spotify's expanded ElevenLabs partnership for seamless AI audiobook creation, Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt's muddled attempt to clarify his store's AI book policy, and a Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner accused of using AI — and why Dan thinks the organizers got their response exactly right.
Listen to the Podcast: potify Expands AI Audiobook Tools
Sponsor
Self-Publishing News is proudly sponsored by PublishMe—helping indie authors succeed globally with expert translation, tailored marketing, and publishing support. From first draft to international launch, PublishMe ensures your book reaches readers everywhere. Visit publishme.me.
About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Thoughts or further questions on this post or any self-publishing issue?
If you’re an ALLi member, head over to the SelfPubConnect forum for support from our experienced community of indie authors, advisors, and our own ALLi team. Simply create an account (if you haven’t already) to request to join the forum and get going.
Non-members looking for more information can search our extensive archive of blog posts and podcast episodes packed with tips and advice at ALLi's Self-Publishing Advice Center.
Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another week of Self-Publishing News. This week AI has been very much in the news — a lot of scandal and controversy. I'll start with what is probably of most interest to everyone out there: the announcement that Spotify's partnership with ElevenLabs has entered its next phase.
You'll remember that last year Spotify partnered with ElevenLabs — the behemoth of AI-generated voice platforms, enabling people to clone their own voices or choose from a range of different accents, pitches, and cadences. They are the big player in AI voice. Last year they announced a partnership allowing AI-voiced audiobooks created in ElevenLabs to be uploaded to the Spotify platform. The new announcement takes this a step further. From June — so from a couple of days' time at the time of recording — it will be invitation-only beta, but it will inevitably roll out much more widely. What it means is that anyone with a Spotify for Authors account will be able to use ElevenLabs within that account to create AI-voiced audiobooks that then seamlessly upload to Spotify.
This is part of Spotify's bid to make things as seamless and frictionless as possible, so that the first place you think of distributing your audiobooks is through them — because you can find all the tools you want under one roof. And as always, their differentiating factor is that this is not an exclusive deal. You can do whatever you want with the audiobook you create through your Spotify for Authors account using ElevenLabs — you don't have to use Spotify to distribute it. You can use the platform purely to create the book and then distribute wherever you wish.
This announcement comes at the same time as ElevenLabs has found itself subject to a lawsuit. ElevenLabs is one of nine tech firms being sued in Illinois under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act — BIPA. The claim is that voice is a key piece of biometric information, as unique as fingerprints, and that in order to train AI voice tools, tech firms must have at some point gathered, stored, and used this biometric information without following the procedures laid down by BIPA — which require getting consent and clearly explaining what the data will be used for. It's going to be a very interesting case. Illinois is being used because its law is much tighter than elsewhere, so it's not necessarily transferable to other jurisdictions, but it is nonetheless a significant lawsuit. An interesting week for AI voice generation and ElevenLabs in particular.
James Daunt and Barnes & Noble's Complicated AI Stance
It has also been a week of controversy. Probably the highest-profile is James Daunt. James Daunt loves to say things that get people riled — or at least he certainly says a lot of things that do, and he loves to speak, so perhaps it amounts to the same thing. His latest stir comes around Barnes & Noble. He caused a fuss by suggesting that the only reason Barnes & Noble objected to stocking AI books was mislabeling — that is, they didn't want to stock books that were AI-generated but not labeled as such. The implication being that if things had been correctly labeled, there would be no objection to stocking them.
That caused quite a lot of fuss. He rushed to clarify his position in an interview with Publishers Weekly, and the clarification arguably made things sound worse. He said: ‘We take active measures to exclude all AI-generated books from our online catalog and never knowingly order any for stocking in our stores. We demand that publishers label any books that are AI-generated.' So far, so clear — they want proper labeling in order to carry out their policy of exclusion. But then he went on to say that if it turned out there was a demand for such books from his readers, he would have no problem in stocking them, provided they were adequately labeled. So: James Daunt trying to clarify his position on AI and not entirely succeeding in a way that readers would approve of.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize and AI Accusation
And that brings us to the other really significant controversy of the week, which is over one of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winners. Author — and I use that word in inverted commas, or ‘allegedly' in inverted commas — Jamia Nazir has won for the story ‘The Serpent in the Grove.' This is a very prestigious short story prize, and the judges were clearly impressed. But other observers have been less than impressed by the claims of authorship. Distinguished academics have said they feel the story is clearly AI-generated, citing what they call AI tells.
I have to say that phrase irritates me, because a lot of those supposed AI tells are things I do myself, and I am most definitely not AI. Heaven help any computer that ever tried to plug into me. Things like em dashes, and apparently what some are calling ‘weak moderators' — phrases like ‘mildly terrifying.' He has a lot of those, and this is apparently proof positive that the work is AI-generated.
The really interesting thing is how the organizers of the contest have responded, and how the publishers of the winning stories — Granta, one of the high-profile publishers in literary fiction — have responded too. Essentially: we have to take an author's word for it. There is no proof positive that AI has been used. We require people to declare whether or not they've used AI. If they say they haven't, we have to take their word for it. And that, honestly, feels like the most honest policy available at the moment.
There is a lot of — I don't want to use the word witch hunt, but I will use the words witch hunting going on. People have set themselves up as AI sleuths, detecting all these tells. Inevitably they will get a lot of positive results, but they will also get a lot of false positives. In my column on this story this week I referenced Arthur Miller — The Crucible being one of my high school literature texts, as it is for many people on both sides of the Atlantic. We are very aware that these things can get out of hand. Once an accusation is made, it is very hard to roll it back. We've seen this already with AI. This isn't a comment on whether this story was or wasn't written by AI. It is a comment on the fact that an increasing body of armchair sleuths doing this work and calling it out publicly is a situation with real consequences.
It feels rather refreshing, actually, to hear the contest organizers and publisher take the approach of saying we have to take people's word for it. It sounds like shrugging your shoulders. But at the moment, shrugging your shoulders and saying we have to take people's word for it probably is the best we can do. And on that note, the best I can do now is sign off before I boil in this spring heatwave, and look forward very much to speaking to you again at the same time next week.
